Chatted briefly to @Amire80 and @Pginer-WMF - the overall advice was to show things exactly as they come from Wikidata, because auto-capitalisation brings with it problems in some languages. The capitalisation as taken from Wikidata may be inconsistent, but surfacing that also gives an impetus for any incorrect capitalisation to be fixed.

I’ve been getting annoyed for months at users adding descriptions with initial uppercase letters (I’d notice it in SpeedPatrolling, which doesn’t provide an easy way to fix the issue) – but small wonder users kept making this mistake, if the app actually shows them the wrong version of every description! Yes, please fix this :)

Thanks for taking this on @Charlotte.

Chatted briefly to @Amire80 and @Pginer-WMF - the overall advice was to show things exactly as they come from Wikidata, because auto-capitalisation brings with it problems in some languages. The capitalisation as taken from Wikidata may be inconsistent, but surfacing that also gives an impetus for any incorrect capitalisation to be fixed.

+1 for “keeping it real” and consistent. Will recommend to make this the default for all products at design review tomorrow (Thursday).

Hey @Charlotte, no blocker to go forward with this on Android from the design team. We might have to think about more educational UI elements or be more clear if we continue to have issues with it.

In addition, the tenor of the design team is to start a discussion about this matter on product level, since this is a sticking point of structured data (that will probably haunt us at a later point in time again). I will continue the conversation in upcoming UI standardization meetings.

Pasting the notes from the discussion here for full transparency:

• Carolyn:
  • it was decided not only for “aesthetic” reasons (community discussion beforehand)
  • Might be a good idea to involve Jon Katz
• Pau:
  • In content translation it’s showed as is
  • Overall advice is to show things exactly as they come from Wikidata, because auto-capitalisation brings with it problems in some languages.
  • The capitalisation as taken from Wikidata may be inconsistent, but surfacing that also gives an impetus for any incorrect capitalisation to be fixed.
  • Ping Lydia from Wikidata and ask about “forced lower case”
• Ed:
  • There is a long history with auto-capitalisation, it was made the default for mediawiki because it made sense for most articles, but it is turned off on some wikis (e.g. wiktionary and other langs which don't capitalise) and has to be override for some articles, e.g. "iPhone"
  • But on a per language basis, it should be correct to convert the case based on the context
• Jess:
  • A nice and small (structured data) problem to kickoff a discussion

Looking good to me on 2.7.50309-alpha-2020-02-18 and a couple previous builds