Last modified: 2013-11-05 18:21:05 UTC
When adding descriptions to items, many of them are the same thing like "river in Mexico". It would be more useful if there was a template-like system for this, so a user can just specify which template to use and the description is added. The main advantage for this is translation. Once a new language is added to the template, it will show up for all items using that "template". Otherwise the current scenario is figure out which pages use the description, and have a bot add the translated version to all of those, over and over. This spawned out of a discussion on my talk page: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Legoktm&oldid=6772762#bot_descriptions
I have been thinking about this some more and I think we should not do this. Wikidata is already complex enough for people to understand. Involving templates in descriptions will just add even more complexity when we are actively trying to make everything easier. There has to be another way to do this.
