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This is an information page.
It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: With the exception of articles for which the title is sufficient to fully describe the article, each Wikipedia article should include a concise explanation of its scope in the form of a short description in a specific format. These descriptions appear in Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches, and help users identify the desired article. |
The short description of a Wikipedia article or of another namespace page is a concise explanation of the scope of the page. These descriptions appear in Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches,[note 1] and help users identify the desired article. When viewing an article, some mobile Wikipedia apps also display the description below the page title.
Short descriptions do not appear by default when viewing an article in desktop view, but logged-in users who wish to see and edit them can do so easily by enabling the Shortdesc helper in their Preferences "gadgets".
Short descriptions provide:
Examples of short description use
Short descriptions are also used as annotations in lists of links, such as "See also" sections and Index list articles, where they provide some context for the link when a local annotation is not provided. The template {{Annotated link}} is available for this purpose.
All mainspace articles should have a short description (including those that are intentionally blank; see below). Redirects and most pages outside the mainspace do not normally need a description, although one may be added in the rare cases it would be useful.
The short description may appear directly in the wikicode for the page, via the {{Short description}} template, or may be transcluded automatically from a template such as an infobox. Disambiguation pages and list articles both make use of transcluded descriptions, and those do not normally need to be edited manually.
The short description is part of the article content, and is subject to the normal rules on content, including Neutral point of view and Biographies of living persons. The normal editing rules such as Consensus and the Editing policy also apply.
Editors should keep in mind that short descriptions are meant to distinguish an article from similarly named articles in search results, and not to define the subject. Each description should provide a brief overview of the topic, a short annotation, and a way to differentiate it from other similarly titled articles.
Ideally, each page should have its own purpose-written short description. While the Shortdesc helper tool allows text to be imported from Wikidata, this should be done with caution as Wikidata descriptions do not follow Wikipedia policies and may be too long or too technical to be used as a short description. It is the editor's responsibility to ensure the short description is appropriate, accurate and compliant with Wikipedia's policies, particularly for biographies of living people and for medical articles.
When visible on desktop or mobile, the short description immediately follows the article title, and should be comprehensible in that location.
A short description is not a definition, and editors should not attempt to define the article's subject nor to summarise the lead. There is no objection to an otherwise-suitable short description that also happens to work as a definition.
As far as possible, it should:
Each short description should:
A good way to draft a short description is to consider the words that would naturally follow if you started a sentence like this:
You can then use those additional words as the short description. So for example if you wanted to write a short description for Stève Nzigamasabo, your sentence would be "Stève Nzigamasabo is a Burundian footballer"; and Burundian footballer becomes your short description.
Here are some examples, though they can all be varied if the context allows something better. See also § Inclusion of dates. Remember to ensure that your description is short (See "Formatting", above).
Dates or date ranges are encouraged when they enhance the short description as an annotation or improve disambiguation. As long as the formatting criteria are met, biographies of non-living people, articles on specific publications, and dated historical events generally benefit from dating, but since the description should be kept short, other information may need to take precedence. Care should be taken when the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy applies: birthdates for living people should not be included unless sourced within the article.
Recommended date formats are given below, but these can be varied if there is contrary consensus on the talk page. In biographies, distinguish between dates defining a lifespan "(birthyear–deathyear)" and those defining a period in office "from startyear to endyear". For historical biographies, specific dates such as『1750–1810』are preferred over "18th-century" for clarity. Other dated events or ranges can use any format as long as the meaning is clear.
| Type | Criterion | Recommended date format | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biography | Lifetime most important | [Person description] (birthyear–deathyear) | English composer (1668–1735) |
| BLP or year of death unknown: [Person description] (born birthyear) | English composer (born 1668) | ||
| Year of birth unknown: [Person description] (died deathyear) | English composer (died 1735) | ||
| Period in office most important | [Office description] from startyeartoendyear |
| |
| Currently in office: [Office description] since startyear | President of Mexico since 2012 | ||
| Term of office contained within one year: [Office description] in start/endyear | President of the United States in 1841 | ||
| Publication | Publication in a specific year | Publicationyear [Description] |
|
| Historical | Event in a specific year | Eventyear [Description] | 1861 American Civil War battle |
| Period or range | [Description] from startyeartoendyear | Epidemic of plague from 1665 to 1666 | |
| [Description] (startyear–endyear) | Epidemic of bubonic plague (1665–1666) | ||
| [Description], startyear–endyear | Epidemic of bubonic plague, 1665–1666 |
Where a date is not known exactly,『c. 』may be used for "circa". Other examples are given at WP:APPROXDATE, although『fl. 』for "floruit" should be avoided as it is not universally understood. Centuries should not be abbreviated『c. 』due to the potential for confusion with "circa".
All articles should have a short description (and therefore should belong to Category:Articles with short description), but some article titles are sufficiently detailed that an additional short description would not be helpful, e.g., Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill.
In those cases, {{Short description|none}} should be used to add the article to Category:Articles with short description. Occasionally, a default value of "none" may already be transcluded, for example in some Wikipedia list articles; that default should not normally need to be edited, but it can be overridden for a specific page by adding {{Short description|Overriding description}} at the top of the page.
The easiest way to create and edit short descriptions on the desktop is to use the Shortdesc helper gadget. This may be enabled in the Gadgets tab of your Preferences under the "Editing" section.
Alternatively, you can manually amend the {{Short description}} template. Short descriptions cannot yet be added with the VisualEditor.
If you are editing manually on desktop and do not have the gadget loaded, do not add a {{Short description}} solely because the template seems to be missing from the wikicode. Descriptions are sometimes set by another template (such as an Infobox) elsewhere in the article.
For more information, see § Why can't I see any short description?.
If you are editing manually, do not start the template with a space — {{ Short description... — this may break other templates which search for the {{Short description... text.
Always use the {{Short description}} template – do not use any alias. See WP:SDNOALIASES
Per MOS:ORDER and MOS:LEADORDER, the template should be the very first element on the page. There is just one exception to this, namely redirects. If (unusually) you need to add a short description to a redirect, you should add {{Short description}} below #REDIRECT. For more information, see § Short descriptions on redirect pages. Placement is handled automatically if you are using Shortdesc helper.
Where a single short description (or rule for generating one) is suitable for multiple articles that all use the same template/infobox, the description can be transcluded from the template rather than being added one by one to each article. In that case {{Short description}} does not appear in the wikicode for the page.
Such transclusions are normally done after local consensus by template editors. {{Template short description}} is available to simplify the process, and ensures that the resultant description doesn't exceed the recommended length even if a page editor adds some unusually long text to an infobox. All templates that generate a default description should include a |2=noreplace parameter so that the result can be overridden by a manually inserted instance that appears at the top of the wikicode (see T193857 for technical details). {{Auto short description}} should also be added to the documentation page so that the template gets added to Category:Templates that generate short descriptions.
By default, short descriptions are not displayed when viewing an article in desktop view. To make them visible on the page and to enable easy editing, enable Shortdesc helper in Preferences. On the desktop platform, short descriptions appear below article titles in search result lists only if you are using the Vector (2022) skin: in Preferences | Appearance, make sure the Vector (2022) radio button is selected.
You can always see whether the page has a manual short description by opening it for source editing (not visual editing); you should find {{Short description}} right at the top. Unfortunately, the absence of {{Short description}} there does not necessarily mean that a short description is missing, as it may be transcluded from some template such as an infobox. That can't be determined from the page code (at least without following through to the template code pages), hence the recommendation to enable Shortdesc helper.
As mentioned above, please don't add a new short description solely on the basis that {{Short description}} is missing from the wikicode.
Wikipedia's short description and Wikidata's item description serve different purposes, and their respective wordings may very often be different.
A short description is Wikipedia-specific and relates to an individual encyclopedia article here on the English Wikipedia. It provides a brief indication of the field, an annotation, and a disambiguation in searches, not for any Wikidata item but for the encyclopedia article itself.
In contrast, a Wikidata item description is designed to disambiguate Wikidata items with the same or similar labels and serves the purpose of characterising the Wikidata item, regardless of the content of any corresponding Wikipedia article or indeed whether a Wikipedia article for the item exists at all.
The difference in purpose often results in differences in wording, and Wikidata item descriptions are very often much longer than is appropriate for a short description (see WP:SDSHORT, above). There are technical differences, too: for example, short descriptions normally start with an uppercase letter whereas Wikidata item descriptions generally use lowercase.
Most redirects do not require a short description. Occasionally it may be useful to add one:
{{Short description}} conflicts with #REDIRECT if placed in the standard position at the top of the page. For such pages only, the template should be placed immediately underneath #REDIRECT.
The short description of a Redirect to section should refer to the section content and should not generally be the same as that of the article itself.
The {{Annotated link}} template can be used to automatically annotate a wikilink with a corresponding short description for the page. This may be useful where links to multiple pages are presented in the form of a list, for example in "See also" sections. {{Annotated link}} does not follow redirects, and if the link has to point to a redirect it may be appropriate to add a short description to the redirect page itself, as it would in this case normally be a redirect with possibilities. In other cases it may be more appropriate to change to a direct link, or use a piped alias. The template should not be used for annotating links on disambiguation pages, for the reasons stated in the template documentation.
The {{AnnotatedListOfLinks}} template may help editors quickly apply {{Annotated link}} to multiple listed links at once.
Content of historical interest |
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Short descriptions were initially implemented in 2017 by WMF developers primarily as a search disambiguator, using item descriptions from Wikidata. After concerns were raised about accuracy, suitability, and the potential for hard-to-detect vandalism on Wikidata, the developers created a SHORTDESC magic word, giving editors the ability to override the Wikidata text directly on Wikipedia:
The magic word approach has been superseded by the Wikipedia template |
