Background
On the apps, we display short descriptions for articles below the title. When a user is reading an article and there is no article description yet added, a prompt is displayed to add one. We've heard feedback on wiki and on phabricator with suggestions on changes that could be made to improve the quality of short descriptions being added to English Wikipedia.
The current flow on iOS looks like this:
 |  |  |  |  |  |
| Article without a short description has call to action for editors with 50+ edits | Onboarding 1 | Onboarding 2 | Editing the short description | "Learn more" leads to Wikipedia: Short description | Exceeding 90 characters shows warning |
The current flow on Android looks like this:
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Article without a short description has call to action for editors with 50+ edits | Onboarding 1 | Onboarding 2 | Onboarding 3 (Machine generated article descriptions is not enabled yet) | Editing the short description | Hard stop at 250 characters | Warning shown if text is entered in the wrong language | Warning shown if text begins with lower case | Warning shown if punctuation is added |
NOTE: Android flow was recently improved with 90 character suggestion: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T385219
Potential improvements
- Motivate users to stay around 40 characters on English WIkipedia
- Make the "Publish description" button inactive if users cross a certain threshold of characters
- Rename from "article description" to "short description" in all locations
- On iOS, add additional warnings when users start with lower case, or attempt to add punctuation