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Best regards! Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:05, 9 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Descriptions edit

Hello! Thanks for your various edits! To further improve your work, could you start descriptions without a capital letter, unless the word needs it? E.g. "Roman politician" is fine, but "son of" is to be preferred. Thanks! --Jahl de Vautban (talk) 08:14, 1 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Jahl de Vautban Thank you for the advice. I was not aware of the need to avoid capital letters. From now on, I will not start descriptions with a capital letter, unless it is a proper noun (eg someone's name). Thanks --Chewings72 (talk) 12:07, 1 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Further to the above point, please can you avoid adding dates of birth and death to descriptions of people, as you did here. Dates are useful, but they are easy to obtain from the relevant properties (P569 and P570) so there is no need to duplicate them in descriptions. I have an application that displays (among other things) a person's name, their description, and their dates of birth and death (e.g. Charles Gounod; French composer; 1818-1893). Adding dates to the description on Wikidata causes them to be displayed twice by applications like mine (i.e. Charles Gounod; French composer (1818-1893); 1818-1893). Thanks! Peter Jonas (shoogle) ([[User talk: |talk]]) 04:20, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Peter Jonas (shoogle) I am happy to oblige with your request in the name of improving the quality of entries on Wikipedia and Wikidata. But before I do so, could you please explain why, given you have such an app, there are so many entries without dates. The reason I am adding dates to short descriptions on Wikipedia (and then exporting them to Wikidata) is that on Wikipedia there are a large number of short descriptions that lack any indication when someone lived. Saying a person is a French author is of little help on its own. I know that short descriptions are meant to be short, so that birth and death dates (year only) are usually all I add. Happy to discuss further. Thanks Chewings72 (talk) 04:34, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Chewings72, thanks for the reply. My application is simply a script to put information about composers into a spreadsheet for research and sheet music cataloguing purposes; it does not contribute data back to Wikidata at this time (i.e. it is not a bot). I appreciate that dates are useful, but I see the description as a way to draw attention to information that is uniquely important to a particular individual (i.e. it answers the question "Why is this person famous?"). With Charles Gounod it is important to highlight his occupation (composer), but with another person you might choose to highlight a different property such as their family relations. Dates of birth and death are important for everyone, so there is no need to highlight them in the description any more than you would repeat the person's name in the description. That's my view anyway. Peter Jonas (shoogle) (talk) 05:46, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Peter Jonas (shoogle) Fair points. Thanks. Chewings72 (talk) 06:05, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Likewise, concise descriptions are better than wordy ones, and accurate are better than incomplete. For example, Aeschylus was an Athenian "playwright", so saying he was "an Athenian author of Greek tragedy" replaces a single accurate noun "playwright" with a four word phrase that loses accuracy, since Aeschylus wrote not only tragedies but also satyr plays. And it is not necessary to add dates to descriptions unless they are useful for distinguishing two people who would other wise have identical descriptions. Since there is only one Ancient Athenian playwright named Aeschylus, no date is needed to distinguish him from other such items. For ancient people, birthplace or profession are usually more useful distinguishers than dates of birth or death, but in this instance none of these are needed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:37, 23 February 2021 (UTC)Reply

EncycloPetey I agree with your suggestion re shortness but I do think adding some sort of date information is useful and justifiable. Saying someone is an English poet is nowhere near as helpful to a sense of the person as saying 12th century English poet or English poet (1123-1189). And adding simple date information does not need much additional text. I know my views on dates are not shared by everyone (as above) but enough Wikipedia articles / Wikidata entries have short descriptions including dates to suggest that I am far from alone in seeing value in including this additional information. Chewings72 (talk) 06:54, 23 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
I did not say that it is never useful. I said that it is sometimes extraneous or superfluous. Where it is possible to be concise, it is preferred to be concise. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:24, 23 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
In the case of ancient Roman women, (as with the Serviliae), since they are often mononymous and many live in the same time period, repalcing their specific descritpions with generic ones such like these is not going to be helpful very often.*Treker (talk) 13:52, 24 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hi Chewings72, kind reminder to start the description with a lowercase if the word doesn't otherwise need it. Cheers, --Jahl de Vautban (talk) 13:06, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Please do not add descriptions about authors to descriptions on data items for their works. Describe the author on the author data item. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:33, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply

OK. Chewings72 (talk) 07:45, 7 September 2023 (UTC)Reply

Call for participation in the interview study with Wikidata editors edit

Dear Chewings72,

I hope you are doing good,

I am Kholoud, a researcher at King’s College London, and I work on a project as part of my PhD research that develops a personalized recommendation system to suggest Wikidata items for the editors based on their interests and preferences. I am collaborating on this project with Elena Simperl and Miaojing Shi.

I would love to talk with you to know about your current ways to choose the items you work on in Wikidata and understand the factors that might influence such a decision. Your cooperation will give us valuable insights into building a recommender system that can help improve your editing experience.

Participation is completely voluntary. You have the option to withdraw at any time. Your data will be processed under the terms of UK data protection law (including the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018). The information and data that you provide will remain confidential; it will only be stored on the password-protected computer of the researchers. We will use the results anonymized to provide insights into the practices of the editors in item selection processes for editing and publish the results of the study to a research venue. If you decide to take part, we will ask you to sign a consent form, and you will be given a copy of this consent form to keep.

If you’re interested in participating and have 15-20 minutes to chat (I promise to keep the time!), please either contact me at kholoudsaa@gmail.com or kholoud.alghamdi@kcl.ac.uk or use this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmmFHaiB20nK14wrQJgfrA18PtmdagyeRib3xGtvzkdn3Lgw/viewform?usp=sf_link with your choice of the times that work for you.

I’ll follow up with you to figure out what method is the best way for us to connect.

Please contact me if you have any questions or require more information about this project.

Thank you for considering taking part in this research.

Regards

Kholoudsaa (talk) 16:12, 17 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Why make it more generic? edit

Why remove context from descriptions? StarTrekker (talk) 11:46, 21 May 2023 (UTC)Reply

I wanted to give a general time period for her life. But it's not a big issue for me. Happy to keep your reversion of my change. By the way, you misspelt Caesar. Chewings72 (talk) 12:03, 21 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. In my opinion time periods are less important than context to who the person was.StarTrekker (talk) 11:50, 1 June 2023 (UTC)Reply