JMinor added a comment.
The problem with "just let the contributor decide" is that, in this case, the editors don't seem to have a consistent policy or knowledge of how these will be used. They edit one description at a time, but this inconsistency only becomes problematic in contexts where many descriptions are displayed together along with titles, etc. To me this is much like page titles, which can be special cased when needed, but where there is a default which is software enforced. By saying "just display inconsistent formatting if thats what editors write" we are shifting some cognitive work of parsing and reading the descriptions to our readers. We could, by policy and community engagement I suppose, ask editors to take that work back and use "Wikipedia case" for all descriptions (or whatever the consensus ends up) or we could use a software solution, in languages where it makes sense, to reduce the burden on both editors and readers. For an example of why casing makes parsing a list of items more effort compare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby Which uses the editors cases and mixes strings like "hospital" with "One of the 50 hills of San Francisco", vs. either Android or iOS's search presentation which normalizes for case. I don't have eye tracking studies or dwell time to prove it, but I feel strongly that the latter is easier to read, visually more pleasing and makes the use of the descriptions look much more intentional. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131013 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: JMinor Cc: siebrand, Amire80, JKatzWMF, dr0ptp4kt, Lydia_Pintscher, Deskana, Dbrant, Nirzar, JMinor, Jhernandez, bmansurov, Aklapper, Sjoerddebruin, D3r1ck01, Izno, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331 _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
