Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-02-27/Tips and tricks
One year after this article is posted, will every single article on Wikipedia have a short description?
Short descriptions are an important tool for readers, and we've come a long way since short descriptions were introduced. I think the community can meet our goal to make Wikipedia a more accessible resource!
But what are they?
Why are they important?
How can we make them better?
Short descriptions began use on the English Wikipedia back in 2018. According to the Short Descriptions WikiProject:
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.
That's pretty useful! Short descriptions are vital for many Wikipedia readers.
How can I help?
Most of Wikipedia's articles do have short descriptions by now ... however, as of February 2025, there are still ~770,000 articles that need short descriptions! To find out which ones do, you can simply use this search to get a list of all that don't. From there, you can refine your search to articles that are within your interests, or simply start adding descriptions to those that appear at the top of the list.
In a nutshell, short descriptions on Wikipedia must start with an uppercase letter, lack punctuation at the end, and be descriptive about the article in under forty characters (although you could go slightly above if necessary). Note that articles with self-explanatory titles can be marked as "none", showing they don't require a short description. Before you start adding short descriptions, learn what a good short description looks like by reading the formatting instructions and examples at Wikipedia's project page about short descriptions.
Tools to use
There are a couple of good tools you can use to assist you in short descriptions to articles. My favorites are the ShortDesc Helper (which you can enable under the "Gadgets" section of your preferences) and the Shortdescs-in-category script.
The ShortDesc Helper allows you to add short descriptions right from the article page without needing to go through the edit section. It can also show you the corresponding Wikidata description item for the article if one exists, and allow you to import and modify it for short descriptions. Note, however, that most Wikidata items will need to be modified while being imported, as Wikipedia has different guidelines from Wikidata for short descriptions, primarily around length.
The Shortdescs-in-category script allows you to see the articles in categories which need short descriptions, and those which don't.
A high challenge
I would like to put forward the following goal for the Wikipedia community: One year after this article is posted, every single article on Wikipedia will have a short description, or will be marked as not requiring one because the title is self-explanatory. It may seem lofty, but I think we can come together and complete short descriptions for all articles!
Discuss this story
Urban Versis 32 and anyone interested in this WikiProject, I think there should be a mandatory requirement for new pages and AfC noms to have a short description and an incoming link from another article. Otherwise, editors will be working on the SHORTDESC and ORPHAN problems in perpetuity, because new articles would continually have to be brought in line with the standards. This would be something similar to how user-generated sources cannot be added to any page. I was thinking of writing something in The Signpost about this, but I was not sure where to start. Thank you for this article. Cheers Matarisvan (talk) 12:30, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
From my perspective, a significant issue here is that the short description does not appear in the default web-based view. I'm in Safari now, and clicking through articles shows no indication that this is present or missing. The only way to know this is to click Edit and examine the source. I am not sure I am using the default view, but it seems a more obvious visual indication would help matters. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:44, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
. No, because not every article requires one, per WP:SDNONE where it says, . Mentioning that fact would have been a service to the community. Marcus Markup (talk) 13:16, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Short Description is indeed a good thing but as a frequent coach at edit-athons, I think we should not add it to the requirements for a new article. New editors have enough trouble with more vital ideas like what's a Reliable Source and why an article should have links to and from other articles. Most editors, old or new, have never had an experienced editor looking over their shoulder and coaching them as I do, and the lack of Short Description should merely doom the new article to be labeled as at best a Start-class or even a Stub. And yes, in perpetuity we'll be working on dead-ends, orphans, and other commonplace shortcomings, and deciding whether a new Stub article is worth the cost of upgrade. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:34, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Writing short descriptions sounds like something which LLMs should be good at assisting with. feminist🩸 (talk) 02:52, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]