Wikimedia Apps/Suggested edits

Suggested edits are a feed to suggest things a user can do to edit the Wikimedia edits in the app.

They will show an article and ask the user to add article (title) descriptions or image captions.

What are article descriptions?
Article descriptions summarize an article to help readers understand the subject at a glance.

These are known in the Wikimedia community as Wikidata descriptions.

What are article descriptions used for?
The description on a Wikidata entry is a short phrase designed to disambiguate items with the same or similar labels. Wikidata descriptions are shown in the apps below article titles to help readers identify the article they're looking for. Descriptions are also shown outside the Wikipedia site and apps: for example, in Google searches.

Tips for creating article descriptions
Article descriptions should ideally fit on one line, and be between two to twelve words long.

They are not capitalized unless the first word is a proper noun, and do not normally begin with initial articles (a, an, the).  For example: 


 * painting by Leonardo da Vinci (title description for an article about the Mona Lisa)


 * Earth’s highest mountain (title description for an article about Mount Everest)

Other tips for writing good article descriptions:
 * Avoid information that is likely to change
 * Avoid opinionated, biased or promotional wording
 * Avoid controversial claims

More information is available on the Wikidata descriptions help page.

What are image captions?
Image captions are:
 * Short, multilingual descriptions of image files
 * Limited to 255 characters in length and cannot contain markup

What are image captions used for?
Image captions describe an image to help readers understand the meaning and context of an image. They are also used to provide alternative information for an image if people cannot view it, e.g. because of a slow internet connection or if people use a screen reader.

Tips for creating image captions
Image captions should be short descriptions of what the image shows. They are generally four to twelve words long.

They can also contain information about the artist or creator of the image.

Remember to keep your captions neutral. Avoid making value judgements such as "beautiful", "good" or "ugly".

The difference between the image description and the image caption is that the description can have a lot of information about the file. If the image is a scan it can have details about the original photograph or artwork. It can have links. The image caption should ignore all this and just describe what it shows, not the information about the file.

A good image caption should:
 * Aim to briefly describe the contents of an image
 * Describe the image such that those with vision or other impairments can imagine what it looks like
 * Contain some keywords that people are likely to use to search for an image (so a picture of a cat should include the word "cat" somewhere in the caption)

In many cases, the caption will be similar or identical to the description (or even the file title!). For example, File:Fire station Hallstatt - October 2017 - 02.jpg has the English caption "Hallstatt fire station in October 2017".

More information
Article descriptions are stored and maintained on Wikidata, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation which provides a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database supporting Wikipedia and other projects.


 * About Wikidata
 * Wikidata help page about article descriptions
 * Guidelines for writing article descriptions in English

Image captions are stored and maintained on Wikimedia Commons, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation which provides an online repository of free-use images, sounds, other media, and JSON files supporting Wikipedia and other projects.