New subject: Wikidata descriptions to show on mobile web Wikipedias

29 Oct 2015

Hi All,

TLDR: on the mobile web, Wikidata descriptions will appear under article
titles in search results, nearby and watchlist starting tomorrow afternoon
(Thu, Oct 29) across projects.  A 'kill switch' has been implemented so
that this feature can be turned off if necessary.

Background:
In Q2 of last year, Wikidata descriptions were added to both our official
apps: iOS and Android and resulted in wonderful qualitative feedback (as
the discovery team knows, it is hard to define 'success' with search (fewer
searches, more searches?).  Though moving Wikidata descriptions to search
on mobile web was planned for Q3 of last year, it has been sitting in beta
for many months as there was some concern that at scale on the web, it
might prove to be an incentive to vandalize Wikidata (and article editors
would not have an obvious, wikipedia way to undo such edits).

Ultimately, we think that anything showing up on Wikipedia should be
editable ON Wikipedia. Wikidata description editing is something we are
going to aim for. Given the success of descriptions in search results on
apps, we would rather move forward with the presentation and work towards a
goal of editing in-line than to hold up the entire thing based on a fear
that might not be warranted. In consultation with the Wikidata team, we
decided to move forward with pushing the feature to stable as long as we
had the ability to pull the feature back if there were any issues.

We are relying on community feedback to let us know if you have any issues
or hear from anyone that this is causing problems. Our community liaison
team will be posting notices on village pumps shortly. Thanks!

Best,

Jon
WMF Reading Product Lead