| Deskana added a comment. |
As one of the people behind capitalising the descriptions in the first place, I (reluctantly) agree that they shouldn't be capitalised any more. I stand by the original decision, and think it was the correct decision at the time, but circumstances have changed.
The statement of the problem is that capitalising descriptions encourages new editors to write descriptions that are capitalised, but Wikidata policy says that descriptions shouldn't be capitalised (with limited exceptions for descriptions beginning with proper nouns, etc.)
Back when descriptions were first added, description editing in the apps wasn't even something that had seriously crossed our minds, so capitalising them kept scan lines consistent, normalised the display, and so on; see T131013#2289870 for @Nirzar's comprehensive explanation of the benefits. I stand by that decision. But, now, description editing is a serious proposition. If we're going to take description editing seriously, then having all the descriptions capitalised is going to push people in the direction of capitalising any descriptions they write. As a movement we already struggle with onboarding new editors due to overly complex policies and unrealistically high standards—there's an entire programme in the annual plan dedicated to new editors for a reason—and we're only going to make it worse by intentionally setting up people to fail by subtly suggesting they should do things one way when they really the policies say the other. It's also important for adoption of description editing more generally, as having serious acceptance of client-side editing of descriptions by Wikidatans is unlikely to happen if app users keep (unintentionally) violating site policy when writing descriptions.
The way I see it, there's a few ways to solve this problem:
- Change Wikidata's policy so that descriptions should be capitalised.
- Attempts to make even less drastic changes to the description policy have failed in the past, so this is unlikely to happen.
- Keep the descriptions capitalised, and change the editing experience to tell people that they shouldn't capitalise descriptions.
- This gets confusing really fast, and people aren't likely to really understand. ("They're capitalised, but don't capitalise it yourself, we'll capitalise it for you, until you try editing it again in which case we won't, but we'll do it again afterwards...")
- Display descriptions as-is.
- Creates inconsistent scan lines, leads to a sense of incompleteness when reading descriptions, etc.
- Stop encouraging people to edit descriptions.
- Violates the "anyone can edit" product principle.
From my perspective, the third solution is really the only viable one.
P.S. The mobile apps were the first product to use Wikidata descriptions below article titles and in search results, and I was the product owner of the apps at the time, so I guess you could say that all the blame for this rests on my shoulders. ;-)
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