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| Shortcuts | WP:WPSHORTDESC, WT:WPSHORTDESC (talk) |
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| Categories | WikiProject Short descriptions, Pages with short description |
| Project banner template | {{WikiProject Short descriptions}} |
| Has goals? | Populate all articles with short descriptions, and improve existing descriptions |
 | Some users are working on the top 3000 most viewed pages without short descriptions. Want to help? Contribute here! |
This is a project to populate all Wikipedia mainspace articles with a suitable short description, and to improve existing descriptions.
There are a total of 6,842,998 content pages in the main namespace, of which 358,822 are disambiguation pages.
Out of 6,484,176 articles — 5,522,492 have a short description and 961,684 do not have a short description.
85.169% complete
This search finds all articles that have had the {{short description}} template added. The remaining descriptions are generated by infoboxes or other templates.
| Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
| Date | Articles with short descriptions |
Total number of articles (including disambiguation pages) |
Percentage of articles with short descriptions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 July 2020 | 1,100,000 | 6,115,000 | 18.0% |
| 29 December 2020 | 1,440,000 | 6,215,000 | 23.2% |
| 15 April 2021 | 2,027,000 | 6,282,000 | 32.3% |
| 19 October 2021 | 2,478,000 | 6,396,000 | 38.7% |
| 12 November 2021 | 3,791,000 | 6,406,000 | 59.2% |
| 15 February 2022 | 4,009,000 | 6,452,000 | 62.1% |
| 23 May 2022 | 4,364,000 | 6,503,000 | 67.1% |
| 3 January 2023 | 4,781,930 | 6,597,400 | 72.5% |
| 25 September 2023 | 5,096,525 | 6,719,582 | 75.8% |
| 25 October 2023 | 5,136,243 | 6,734,013 | 76.3% |
| 25 December 2023 | 5,213,928 | 6,761,907 | 77.1% |
| 28 January 2024 | 5,263,307 | 6,775,839 | 77.7% |
| 25 February 2024 | 5,315,618 | 6,788,970 | 78.3% |
| 25 March 2024 | 5,356,339 | 6,802,440 | 78.7% |
| 25 April 2024 | 5,405,531 | 6,816,669 | 79.3% |
| 27 May 2024 | 5,477,532 | 6,827,883 | 80.2% |
| 25 June 2024 | 5,517,348 | 6,840,932 | 80.7% |
Note: The article counts prior to March 2023 are rounded values taken from Size of Wikipedia: The data set.
See checklists of current progress.
85.726% complete — Last updated: 24 June 2024
Short descriptions appear in Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches, and help users identify the desired article. When viewing an article, some mobile Wikipedia Apps also display the description below the page title.
Articles that are lacking a short description appear in search result lists simply by their titles, with no annotation. If all titles were self-evidently clear, it would be immediately obvious which one relates to the article of interest, but very often that is not the case. Titles alone can be ambiguous or otherwise not comprehensible to non-specialist readers, as well as to readers who are not fluent speakers of English.
The easiest way to add and edit short descriptions on desktop is to make use of Shortdesc helper. Alternatively, in the source code editor insert the short description template to the very top of the page, above all other article headers and templates. The format to use is {{Short description|Your short description here}}.
If a short description would be redundant you can use "none", thus: {{Short description|none}}. See WP:SDNONE.
Short descriptions can be added and edited using the standard wiki markup editor (edit source), but it is often easier to enable Short description helper in Preferences | Gadgets, in the Editing section.
If the article currently has no short description, you will see a message to that effect. Click on Add, type in a new short description (or drag and drop from the article text, editing as appropriate), then Save. If a short description already exists you can Edit it, or click on Export to push the text, as-is, to Wikidata.
If Wikipedia has no short description, but there is an existing Wikidata description, you have the option to Import the Wikidata text as-is into Wikipedia (not generally recommended), or to Import and Edit (preferred).
A cogwheel icon that appears after you click Edit provides various usage options. By default, adding a short description to a Wikipedia article also adds the description to Wikidata if missing there. This can be changed in the settings. To edit a short description that is already on Wikidata, click on one of the links (not shown in this example) in the Wikidata item description or Q-number to open the item at Wikidata.
Difference in formatting conventions:
When a description does not yet exist on Wikidata and a new short description is supplied all in lower case, Shortdesc helper sends the text in lower case to Wikidata while simultaneously formatting the short description correctly in Sentence case for the Wikipedia page. However, when exporting a modified short description to Wikidata it is necessary to go to Wikidata and manually edit the description there to change the first uppercase letter to lower case.
Shortdesc helper will provide a standardised edit summary describing the edit. A custom edit summary can be added using the "summary" button.
Wikidata maintains its own texts which are not linked in any way with Wikipedia short descriptions (although Short description helper can display the Wikidata text to help editors construct a suitable description for Wikipedia). Wikipedia page Short descriptions and Wikidata item descriptions serve different purposes and are not required to be the same. If you want to view the Wikidata item description, you can:
Neither the Wikidata item description nor the Wikipedia short description should give a definition of the subject covered by the article; see WP:SDNOTDEF and Wikidata:Help:Description#Descriptions are not definitions for more details.
As the short description is article content, any bot or template generated short description may be overridden with a better short description by an editor. If there is a dispute about whether the new description is better, discuss on the article's talk page. If the lead section of the article is so confused that it is not possible to work out what the article is about, leave an appropriate maintenance tag or, if you can, fix it yourself.
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This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items.
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| Name | # of articles total | # without short description |
|---|---|---|
{{Infobox book}} |
51,000 | 14,800 |
{{Infobox station}} |
55,000 | 9,800 |
{{Infobox mountain}} |
28,000 | 9,000 |
{{Infobox election}} |
30,300 | 7,360 |
{{Infobox military installation}} |
9,600 | 4,800 |
{{Infobox religious building}} |
12,000 | 3,800 |
{{Infobox sports competition event}} |
11,500 | 3,100 |
{{Infobox locomotive}} |
4,700 | 2,800 |
{{Infobox planet}} |
4,600 | 2,400 |
{{Infobox play}} |
4,100 | 1,200 |
{{Infobox RNA family}} |
1,200 | 900 |
{{Infobox artist discography}} |
5,700 | 700 |
Templates and modules that are useful for this/created for helping with short descriptions:
|location= and getting shorter locationYes, but only if it complies with the guidance at WP:SDFORMAT, including the length recommendation (the vast majority of short descriptions are shorter than 40 characters). If it is good, you can copy it to Wikipedia in one click using the helper gadget, or choose to edit the text beforehand. There is no legal issue with copying, as all Wikidata texts are in the public domain.
No. The idea of bulk-importation from Wikidata has been rejected in an RFC. Wikidata texts are often not suitable as they are not subject to Wikipedia's policies, and have a different purpose.
Start with topics where you are sufficiently familiar to be able to write a good short description. If you run out, do anything that you are confident you can handle. If in doubt, leave it out. When dealing with biographies, follow the WP:BLP policy scrupulously. Don't add a date of birth unless it is properly sourced in the article.
-incategory:"Articles with short description" -incategory:"All disambiguation pages" — this ignores any disambiguation pages, as they are being handled separately. You could add something like articletopic:physicsorneartitle:"San Francisco" to limit to topics or places of interest.
The search parameter -hastemplate:"Short description" identifies articles that do not have the template {{short description}}.
You can simply use the input box below:
{{subst:Uw-longsd}} can be used to warn editors who continually add very long short descriptions (documentation here). You can also write a personalized message addressing the problem, which may be more effective or appropriate in some cases.
Add your signature to the bottom of the list of project members.
Add {{User Short descriptions}} to your user page to be included in Category:WikiProject Short descriptions participants. The userbox looks like this:
| This user is a participant in WikiProject Short descriptions. |
You can also display a top icon as well, by adding {{Short descriptions topicon}} anywhere in your user page.
Counts of different types of pages having short descriptions
Categories for this project
Counts of Short description vs. Wikidata
Counts of modules/templates that create short descriptions
Maintenance category to identify problems with the template parameters
Maintenance categories to list pages with descriptions over 100 characters
Issues with Short descriptions
| To display all subcategories click on the "►": |
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Short description is different from Wikidata (3,895,724 P)
Short description matches Wikidata (2,038,860 P)
Short description with empty Wikidata description (132,021 P) |
Previous and current discussions on English WP short description and WikiData descriptions
Note: Template talk:Short description redirects to Wikipedia talk:Short description
| When | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-03-27 | Administrators' noticeboard | Hard to detect mobile vandalism |
| 2017-03-28 | Village pump (technical) | Discussion at ANI about Wikidata use in mobile view |
| 2017-03-30 | Village pump (proposals) | RFC Remove description taken from Wikidata from mobile view of en-WP — 2017-03-30 Withdrawn |
| 2017-03-30 | Village pump (proposals) | Blockers to having short description on mobile |
| 2017-11-09 | Template talk | Some history and explanation of this template for those without the time or inclination to read the full discussion |
| 2017-12-08 | Village pump (proposals) | RFC Populating article descriptions magic word |
| 2018-02-07 | Wikipedia talk | 2018 State of affairs - Short descriptions |
| 2018-02-17 | Manual of Style talk | (position of) Short descriptions (in articles) |
| 2018-04-14 | Template talk | Infobox settlement - short descriptions |
| 2019-04-13 | Manual of Style talk | Where to put {{short_description}} |
| 2020-05-15 | Village pump (WMF) | Update: Scheduled shutdown of Wikidata descriptions on EnWiki |
| 2020-08-03 | WikiData | Pi bot 14 — Import short descriptions from the English Wikipedia (bot task to copy English WP short descriptions to WikiData)  Y 2020-10-20
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| 2020-08-03 | Wikipedia talk | Copying short descriptions to Wikidata — Reference to Pi bot 14 / Pi bot 5 |
| 2020-08-03 | Wikipedia Bot Requests | Pi bot 5 — Synchronise short descriptions with Wikidata (bot task to copy all WikiData descriptions to English WP) — 2020-09-15 Denied |
| 2020-08-06 | Village pump (proposals) | RFC Synchronising short descriptions and Wikidata descriptions — 2020-09-05 Closed No |
| 2020-08-07 | WikiProject talk | + RfC on bot-importing short descriptions to and from Wikidata — Reference to the above |
| 2020-08-07 | WikiProject talk | Bot proposal to create short descriptions from scratch |
| 2020-08-07 | Wikipedia talk | + Report-assisted importing of short descriptions — Reference to the above |
| 2021-07-20 | Redirects for discussion | Proposal to delete the 7 Aliases for Short description template — 2021-07-29 closed as Clear consensus to delete the first 5 — 4 deleted |
| Opened | Ticket | Title | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-01-03 | T184000 | Magic word on English WP to override display of Wikidata short description | 2018-04-09 |
| 2018-05-04 | T193857 | Support 'noreplace' keyword in {{SHORTDESC}} | 2018-07-02 |
| 2020-03-25 | T248457 | Fully terminate use of Wikidata item descriptions as short article descriptions for English Wikipedia articles | 2023-01-29 |
| 2020-06-30 | T256817 | [EPIC] Replace Wikidata descriptions on enwiki with local descriptions — Parent to T257486, T257488 and others | 2022-01-28 |
| 2020-07-08 | T257486 | Switch search to use local descriptions on enwiki | 2021-04-26 |
| 2020-07-08 | T257488 | Adding/editing descriptions should modify the local article, not Wikidata | 2021-04-26 |
| 2020-07-13 | T257867 | Adding/editing descriptions should modify the local article, not Wikidata — iOS task | 2021-04-26 |
| 2020-08-04 | T259617 | Article description editing API — Overview of managing local descriptions | |
| 2020-08-04 | T259622 | System Administrator disables Wikidata fallback for article descriptions — Live on 2020-10-13 | |
| 2020-08-25 | T261237 | Update terminology for "Article Descriptions" to match across feature — iOS app | 2021-04-26 |
| 2020-09-03 | T261977 | Add tool tip for editing Wikidata descriptions in the iOS app | 2021-04-26 |
| 2020-09-21 | T263493 | Reader gets appropriate article short description in search results — REST API — Live on 2020-10-13 (First direct display of Short descriptions on desktop skins) |
2020-10-19 |
| 2021-04-08 | T279702 | Suggestededit-add_1.0 is suggesting bad short descriptions on en.WP; short description feature should be disabled until fixed | 2022-04-21 |
| 2021-08-18 | T289214 | Switch to OOUI TitleInputWidget for the link-inserter in WikiEditor — Live on 2021-10-14 | 2021-11-08 |
| 2021-12-09 | T297341 | Brand-new editors are still being guided to adding terrible short descriptions on en.WP (follows on from T279702) |
