Topic on User talk:Sjoerddebruin

Could you explain what you find unsuitable in the descriptions you are removing? If you are concerned about the inclusion of the ORCID ID, that was necessary to disambiguate them as there are many identical names in that group of items.

I’ve asked in the Telegram group and people agreed with me, I even think someone mentioned you there. These are not useful, they don’t help the reader or editor at all.

I disagree. It is far more useful than a blank description. I keep finding these while manually searching Wikidata and the lack of descriptions make it very frustrating.

Hi Sjoerddebruin,

I think it's important to discuss mass reverts before carying them out. That was already mentioned at Wikidata:Edit groups but I will add that to the tool's UI to avoid that problem in the future.

(By discussing I mean discussing them with the author and ideally on wiki)

I thought the tool worked the same as the smart rollback script which marks edits as bot edits, sorry.

Because the edits are carried out with the user's account, that's not possible (not all users have a bot flag), but I agree that it would be a useful thing to have. I guess that means I would need to use a dedicated account like QuickStatementsBot. If you think that it is better, it should not be too hard to implement. (Another issue with the current system is that the OAuth tokens can expire, so the undoing can stop unexpectedly, which I think happened in your case. That's why I resumed the undoing from my own account when I saw that)

@Tagishsimon: as someone who is also adding ORCID descriptions and thus should also be in the loop about this as well. Mahir256 (talk) 14:03, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Mahir 256. Sjoerddebruin, I spend a lot of time adding new items for en wikipedia articles on humans. To do so, it is necessary to search for items having the same name. Pretty much all such searches will pull up one or several ORCID person items, or CBDB items. Because these have no descriptions, it is necessary to waste time inspecting each of them to find out they are not the footballer/politician/whatever that you're searchig for. Adding descriptions including the ORCID ID or the CBDB id is clearly useful. Your assertion "These are not useful, they don’t help the reader or editor at all." is manifestly wrong. Please do not revert such edits.