User:Deskana (WMF)/Proposals/Zerorate

Proposer
Dan Garry, on behalf of the Discovery Department.

Statement of the problem


As a user, I'd like to look something up on Wikipedia so I can find out what it is.

The above user story is central to Wikipedia's existence. People look things up on Wikipedia to find out what they are every day. But the long, complex prose in the first sentences of Wikipedia articles make it difficult to find out what something is at a glance. On the other hand, Wikidata descriptions are short, simple, and factual definitions of what something is, but they are not exposed to readers. To address the above problem, the Mobile Apps Team developed and shipped the lead image feature (see image to the right). But many articles still don't have Wikidata descriptions in English, a problem which is even worse when you consider languages that are not English.

In Q4, the Mobile Apps Team will pilot a feature which will let logged in app users seamlessly edit Wikidata descriptions in-line from articles. The process should be no more complex than tapping an edit pencil, entering some text into a text box, and tapping save. We could even use automatically generated descriptions (like those offered by Magnus Manske's AutoDesc API) to give the user a place to start. This will allow motivated power readers to contribute descriptions, without even having to realise they're interacting with Wikidata. This quick win will allow us to fill out Wikidata descriptions more completely, so that looking something up on Wikipedia to find out what it is is even better than before, and will lay the groundwork for further experiments in mobile-appropriate contributions in the app.

Deliverables
The feature the team will commit to getting into production by the end of Q4 is:
 * Wikidata descriptions will be editable by logged in users in production on the Wikipedia app for iOS and Android

Success criteria
The metrics that will determine success is:
 * The proportion of articles that do not have Wikidata descriptions will decrease
 * All successful edits to a Wikidata description in the Wikipedia app make it to Wikidata instantaneously
 * Wikidata description editing will have a higher number of people starting the workflow than wikitext editing on the Wikipedia app
 * Wikidata description editing will have a higher completion rate (from start to finish) than wikitext editing on the Wikipedia app

Resourcing requirements
The proposer of this project estimates that the following resources are the minimum required to achieve this goal:
 * 2 FTE iOS engineers
 * 2 FTE Android engineers
 * 1 FTE user-experience designer
 * 1 FTE product manager
 * 0.5 FTE scrum master
 * 0.5 FTE QA tester