Suggestededit-add_1.0 is suggesting bad short descriptions on en.WP; short description feature should be disabled until fixed
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT
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	Jonesey95
	Apr 8 2021, 6:00 PM

Description

Steps to reproduce

Suggestedit is suggesting decapitalization of short descriptions and sometimes suggests utterly terrible short descriptions for articles that already have good ones.

Expected results

For now, the tool should not interact with short descriptions until it can comply with the guidance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_description#Formatting

Actual results

See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=1016712260#Wikipedia_app's_SuggestEdit_ruining_short_descriptions for links to buggy diffs.

Stack trace

Environments observed

App version:
Android OS versions:
Device model:
Device language:

Related Objects

Mentioned In: T304621: Disable Suggested Edits for users with less than 3 edits when on English Wikipedia
T297341: Brand-new editors are still being guided to adding terrible short descriptions on en.WP
Mentioned Here: T304621: Disable Suggested Edits for users with less than 3 edits when on English Wikipedia

Event Timeline

Jonesey95 created this task.Apr 8 2021, 6:00 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptApr 8 2021, 6:00 PM

JohnFromPinckney subscribed.Apr 8 2021, 6:22 PM

GhostInTheMachine subscribed.Apr 9 2021, 11:11 AM

It's also suggesting short descriptions that are just bizarre - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LB%26SCR_A1_class&curid=2246060&diff=1017152084&oldid=1015979750

Can someone please disable this tool until it can be debugged?

JJMC89 removed a project: Android-app-Bugs.Apr 11 2021, 7:40 PM

Novem_Linguae subscribed.Apr 12 2021, 11:31 PM

Thanks for reporting this -- we'll take a look and update our in-app guidance to match the rules on the wiki page.

For a little more context: in all languages except English the short description is written to Wikidata, where the guidance for capitalization is the opposite of the guidance on enwiki, and we have not yet implemented a special case for this in our code, unfortunately.

And just to clarify a few things about what we mean by "suggestions" or "suggested" descriptions:
The app does not do any kind of automatic pre-populating of the description. The examples you cite that are bizarre or nonsensical were in fact typed by users themselves. What the app "suggests" is merely articles that are currently missing descriptions, so that the user can populate them.

One other point of confusion is the suggestededit-add comment, which is getting added regardless of whether the edit came from the "suggestions" feature, or from plain editing from within the article itself. This is a bug in our code, which will also be fixed in our next update.

Most of the edits linked above were incorrect modifications to existing short descriptions, so fixing the two bugs described above (the edit summary containing "suggestedit-add" incorrectly, and fixing the lower-casing of the first letter) should help.

I remain confused by edits like this one, where the only change to the page was a one-letter change to the short description. Something in this new tool/app suggested that edit to the editor, either indirectly or directly, and that should not happen.

There is already a short description import suggestion tool at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Shortdesc_helper. Suggesting an article and hoping that an inexperienced editor will make up a good short description from scratch is probably not wise. Has any QA analysis been done on the SDs created with this tool to see what percentage of them are good?

But short descriptions are supposed to be lowercased right..? The presentation layer is supposed to sentence case depending on context and language. I clearly remember this as being part of the original ideas behind short descriptions.

[edit] Oh this is about the exception English Wikipedia... nvmd

LGoto moved this task from Epics in Progress to Ready for dev on the Wikipedia-Android-App-Backlog (Android Release FY2020-21) board.Apr 16 2021, 4:13 PM

@LGoto
Looks like @Dbrant had a PR of fixing it, and it has been merged.
https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia/pull/2305

Move this to Merged and Waiting.

Dbrant moved this task from Merged and Waiting to Ready for release on the Wikipedia-Android-App-Backlog (Android Release FY2020-21) board.Apr 27 2021, 6:12 PM

Dbrant closed this task as Resolved.May 6 2021, 6:51 PM

Novem_Linguae unsubscribed.Nov 23 2021, 1:08 PM

Jonesey95 mentioned this in T297341: Brand-new editors are still being guided to adding terrible short descriptions on en.WP.Dec 9 2021, 6:10 AM

This is still happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deerfield_Society_of_Arts_and_Crafts&type=revision&diff=1065432958&oldid=996235356 (13 January 2022)

Re-opening this task for investigation.

SNowick_WMF subscribed.Jan 19 2022, 4:37 PM

scblr moved this task from Needs Triage to Tracking on the Wikipedia-Android-App-Backlog board.Jan 19 2022, 5:17 PM

LGoto moved this task from Tracking to Needs Triage on the Wikipedia-Android-App-Backlog board.Jan 19 2022, 5:19 PM

This suggest-edit tool is apparently not checking short descriptions for appropriate capitalization (or automatically capitalizing). see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2013_Mutua_Madrid_Open_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_doubles&diff=prev&oldid=1048674121 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Novoli_railway_station&diff=prev&oldid=1048674098

Short descriptions need to start with a capital letter, with nearly zero exceptions, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_description#SDFORMAT

The capitalization issue has been solved so closing this out

Not fixed (14 Feb 2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=R.E._Farm_Commonwealth_War_Graves_Commission_Cemetery&type=revision&diff=1071796845&oldid=1020541202

Still happening (16 February 2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Izidorius_Pocius&type=revision&diff=1072227690&oldid=960104561

Here's a brand new editor adding a short description tagged with suggestedit. Brand new editors should not be offered short descriptions as an editing option. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Prilep-Bitola_dialect&diff=prev&oldid=1074828986

Jonesey95 reopened this task as Open.Mar 2 2022, 1:42 PM

MichaelMaggs subscribed.Mar 2 2022, 6:28 PM

@Jonesey95 We do have a threshold before offering suggested edits, so this shouldn't be happening with brand new editors with no previous edits. We'll investigate.

JTannerWMF mentioned this in T304621: Disable Suggested Edits for users with less than 3 edits when on English Wikipedia.Mar 24 2022, 3:54 PM

Thank you for flagging that and this suggestion. We have temporarily disabled Suggested Edits on EN wiki (as seen in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T304621) for users that do not have more than 3 edits. We have evidence that experienced users make helpful edits with suggested edits. In the future we will have easier tasks for new comers. We will expose those suggested edits tasks to new users during that time. Additionally, we have done a lot of work recently on communication tools in the app as requested, so feel free to leave feedback to users that needs improvement so that they may become more productive editors.

It looks like this technical fix did not work. A new editor with just two prior contributions appears to have used suggestedit to spam invalid short descriptions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/1NiNja1bUmhSoTXozBRBEtR8LeF9TGbZBN_1_.pdf

This feature should probably be limited to extended confirmed editors, or a similar threshold.

Not commercial spam. But here's another one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Abdirizak_aadan_ibraahim

Suggestededit-add_1.0 is suggesting bad short descriptions on en.WP; short description feature should be disabled until fixedClosed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORTActions