This barnstar is awarded to everyone who - whatever their opinion - contributed to the discussion about Wikipedia and SOPA. Thank you for being a part of the discussion. Presented by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Latest comment: 54 minutes ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hi LucasBrown. Thank you for your multiple edits to short descriptions, but I wonder if I may make a suggestion? As many people seeing {{Short description|none}} do not understand it, they try to be "helpful" by entering precisely the sort of description you are going around deleting. I have found that adding some hidden text, e.g. <!-- None is correct - please see [[WP:SDNONE]] --> immediately after the {{Short description|none}} reduces (I won't say stops) the number of overwrites. Just a suggestion - best wishes - Arjayay (talk) 09:48, 17 May 2024 (UTC)Reply
I'm afraid I see "none" as amazingly unhelpful, as it assumes that titles are "obvious".
The trouble with "obviousness" is that it is culturally dependent, i.e. what's "obvious" to you is far from obvious to Ahmed, Betty, Carolus from Poland, and Zak from Guyana. I suggest that the value of a "Short description" is that it hints at the area in which the article belongs, thus saving people time when it pops up and indicates to them that they are, or are not, in the right area, so they may navigate accordingly.
I suggest, therefore, that a Short description of "Culinary tradition" is a great deal more helpful to folks from all over – who may well have no idea what the borrowed French word "cuisine" actually means (are we talking haute gastronomie or what?) – than the explicitly unhelpful "none" or whatever random default text that may possibly bring. Accordingly I'm going to modify a whole batch of your edits to this effect, and I hope you'll be more thoughtful in future when deleting useful data from Wikipedia. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:29, 10 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
What does being borrowed from French have to do with recognition of a common word that's been part of English since at least the 18th century? And if they don't know the French-derived term "cuisine", why (whether from Canada or Poland or Ghana) will they know the Latin-derived term, introduced into English a century later, "culinary"? Anyway the SD isn't meant to give dictionary definitions for the individual words in the title. Largoplazo (talk) 13:39, 10 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
@Chiswick Chap: I've reverted a couple of your changes where, in one case, your edit summary reads "a brief SD has value". Please don't undo what others are doing specifically in compliance with the guideline. WP:SDNONE basically says that titles like this are self-descriptive and that, in such cases, to put "None". If you disagree, you ought to take it up at Wikipedia talk:Short description. Largoplazo (talk) 16:10, 10 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, but none of the cuisine titles are necessarily self-descriptive, specially if people aren't quite sure what cuisine means, for instance, so it is useful to be able to learn that an article is about a cooking tradition. This "it's in xyz category" is the job of the SD. If it were true that titles could be obvious then the SD would be redundant..... along with Encyclopedias for that matter. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:50, 10 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Again, if you disagree with the guideline, then take it up at the project page, especially since you've got three people here disagreeing with you. This isn't Simple English Wikipedia, and some of your edits belie what you're saying here. At West African cuisine, for example, you added "Overview of the cuisine of West Africa". Every single article on Wikipedia is an overview of its topic, so "overview of" is no help at all, and I fail to see how "cuisine of West Africa" is clearer than "West African cuisine". And you haven't addressed how "culinary traditions" is clearer than "cuisine". And what about readers who don't know what West Africa is? If worse comes to worst and a reader doesn't know a term that's part of a descriptive title, they can look it up. Re your penultimate sentence, the titles of these articles already are in the form of "this is in the xyz category", that's the point. Largoplazo (talk) 18:04, 10 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
