Putting code where my mouth is: If you add the line
mw.loader.load('//tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/autodesc.js');
to your user subpage at :
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Mypage/common.js
you can see automatic descriptions is your Wikidata search results, both in
the full search page and in the dropdown preview.
Notes:
* Hackish demo. May jump in your face at any time.
* English only, though planned as multi-lingual. In other languages, some
interface elements will show in English, but most of the actual description
should be in your language, as available.
* Automatic description color-highlighted, to distinguish from manual one
(surprisingly hard in some cases).
* Two of my test searches are "Dawkins" and "Runaway". Good spread of
results there.
* This works /in principle/ also in the edit dropdowns (you will see dummy
text there), but I can't figure out how the item Q number is encoded in the
dropdown HTML. A little help or a very minor interface tweak would enable
the function there as well.
Wikidata techs: Feel free to steal^W build on this code ;-) Hereby GPL or
whatever else you require.
Enjoy!
On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:32 PM, Sven Manguard <[email protected]>wrote:
> I agree with all four of those points. As your question, we do not have
> that type of property yet, and although it might be slightly controversial,
> I would certainly support it. We would however need monolingual text as a
> property type before that could happen. Personally I see supporting web
> addresses as being much more critical on the list of properties for
> development, is that would dramatically open up our ability to source data.
> That being said, I really haven't been keeping up with the development
> schedule, so I have no idea what's in the pileline and in what order.
>
> S
> On Sep 7, 2013 1:44 PM, "Magnus Manske" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> All valid points, Sven. I would just like to say that
>> * this is not intended as a replacement or auto-fill for descriptions; it
>> is to be shown if the manual description is blank (at least, that was my
>> angle)
>> * unusual items, like your example, will likely have a manual desription;
>> the run-of-the-mill millitary person will not
>> * for many uses, even an imperfect or (through omission) somewhat
>> misleading description is better than none
>> * as in your example, a misrepresentation is first and foremost due to
>> the incompleteness of Wikidata and the properties it offers
>>
>> The last one reminds me: is there a "reason for notability" property? In
>> your example item, the Ft. Hood shootings could be added that way, and then
>> also show up in the description ("notable for Ft. Hood shooting").
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Sven Manguard <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> This has the potential to work, but we need to be careful that the
>>> descriptions don't only partially represent their subjects. This is
>>> especially difficult with humans, as they are often known for several
>>> things, and occasionally (but in a statistically significant number, I
>>> would think), known for things that don't fit cleanly into a "[nationality]
>>> [career], born [birth year]" formula. As it exists now, the Wikidata item
>>> on the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan [1], gives his military branch and
>>> rank, his location and place of birth, his gender, and a Commons category.
>>> From that, a bot summary would likely be "American Army major, born 1970".
>>> There would be no indication of his source of notability, the shooting.
>>>
>>> What I would recommend is that we start with inanimate objects and get
>>> our bearings on bot-generated descriptions there (celestial objects, video
>>> games, buildings), then move onto the slightly more complicated to define
>>> non-human living things (species of plant, species of animal, species of
>>> creepy-crawly) and geographic locations (rivers, villages/towns/cities,
>>> mountain ranges), and then finally onto humans.
>>>
>>> Some things to think about: How do you create a description for a
>>> battleship that saw service with several different navies or a river that
>>> runs through several different countries? How do you create a description
>>> for a country that does not exist anymore or a location that has been
>>> destroyed? How do you create a description for a fictional person, item,
>>> place, etc., when Wikidata does not currently have an effective way of
>>> denoting that something is fictional? It might make sense to use Wikipedia
>>> categories to augment the Wikidata statements.
>>>
>>> I think that we should build a few formulas that are... difficult to
>>> screw up. Video games come to mind, because the formula "[year of first
>>> publication] [genre] video game" is really all you need, and other than
>>> that some games have multiple genres, there's no way to get the description
>>> wrong. Once the people with coding knowledge figure out what they want to
>>> do implementation wise, I'll be happy to work with the formulas.
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1400551#sitelinks-wikipedia
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Luca Martinelli <
>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 2013/9/7 Magnus Manske <[email protected]>:
>>>> > I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short
>>>> > descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages.
>>>> If we
>>>> > have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence
>>>> like
>>>> > "Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel
>>>> prize,
>>>> > Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.
>>>>
>>>> +1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Luca "Sannita" Martinelli
>>>> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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