@Aklapper Oh, okay. So the magic word is intended to be used only on English Wikipedia. But what about 56% of ours articles which is using template? Should I start removing it from articles?

In T240746#5741439, @Acamicamacaraca wrote:

So the magic word is intended to be used only on English Wikipedia. But what about 56% of ours articles which is using template? Should I start removing it from articles?

That is a very good question and I unfortunately don't know the answer. I hope that @DannyH could provide guidance here, as they wrote T204136#4584681

@Acamicamacaraca: Because the {{SHORTDESC}} magic word only works on the English Wikipedia, the simplest way of fixing the problem in the short-term is to replace all instances of {{SHORTDESC: (which invokes a magic word) with {{SHORTDESC| (which calls a template). This needs to be done in the local version of Template:Short_description and any other templates that invoke the magic word directly (and, of course, in any articles that invoke the magic word directly, but hopefully there are none of those).

Then Template:SHORTDESC itself can be modified to "ignore" its input — actually, I just did that, since the template was not doing anything useful.

You can look at some other non-English-Wikipedia versions of Template:SHORTDESC and Template:Short_description to see how they have been modified after they were copied over (I don't know if any of them are actually doing anything useful, either — it looks like most of them have simply been "disabled").

For more help with this, look/ask around on the English Wikipedia (say, at en:Wikipedia:Short description or en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions).

@Dcljr Okay. You managed to disable that template, but what about 352,404 articles that is using this one — Шаблон:Кратак опис?

If we just disable it, then it leaves a large number of articles using it for no reason. So the question is: Should the template be massively removed from articles or will and can a local exception be created for sr.wiki?

In T240746#5744475, @Acamicamacaraca wrote:

@Dcljr Okay. You managed to disable that template, but what about 352,404 articles that is using this one — Шаблон:Кратак опис?

If we just disable it, then it leaves a large number of articles using it for no reason. So the question is: Should the template be massively removed from articles or will and can a local exception be created for sr.wiki?

A local exception will apparently not be created for any wiki.

No other discussion about this is on-topic here on Phabricator, since wiki content discussions belong on the relevant wikis.

I will be leaving a message on your user_talk page on the Serbian Wikipedia so we can discuss this further (not that I have a lot of knowledge about this, but any more I say here will be off-topic, and will annoy The Powers That Be :).

In T240746#5746729, @Dcljr wrote:

In T240746#5744475, @Acamicamacaraca wrote:

@Dcljr Okay. You managed to disable that template, but what about 352,404 articles that is using this one — Шаблон:Кратак опис?

If we just disable it, then it leaves a large number of articles using it for no reason. So the question is: Should the template be massively removed from articles or will and can a local exception be created for sr.wiki?

A local exception will apparently not be created for any wiki.

No other discussion about this is on-topic here on Phabricator, since wiki content discussions belong on the relevant wikis.

I will be leaving a message on your user_talk page on the Serbian Wikipedia so we can discuss this further (not that I have a lot of knowledge about this, but any more I say here will be off-topic, and will annoy The Powers That Be :).

I believe that edit was merely a reflection of the discussion on this task, and not an official position of the WMF

I would love to hear the WMF's position, but I doubt the situation will change. It looks like I'll probably have to remove hundreds of thousands of template usages from articles by a bot.