User:MichaelMaggs/Draft SD guidance - current
"none" as a short description
[edit]All articles should have a short description (and therefore should belong to Category:Articles with short description), but some article titles are sufficiently detailed that an additional short description would not be helpful, e.g., Alpine skiing at the 1960 Winter Olympics – Men's downhill.
In those cases, {{Short description|none}} should be used to add the article to Category:Articles with short description. Occasionally, a default value of "none" may already be transcluded, for example in some Wikipedia list articles; that default should not normally need to be edited, but it can be overridden for a specific page by adding {{Short description|Overriding description}} at the top of the page.
Examples
[edit]A good way to draft a short description is to consider the words that would naturally follow if you started a sentence like this:
- "[Article subject] is/was a/an/the ... ".
You can then use those additional words as the short description. So for example if you wanted to write a short description for Stève Nzigamasabo, your sentence would be "Stève Nzigamasabo is a Burundian footballer"; and Burundian footballer becomes your short description.
Here are some examples, though they can all be varied if the context allows something better. See also § Inclusion of dates. Remember to ensure that your description is short (See "Formatting", above).
- For a person: "[country adjective] [what the person is known for]" (Examples: "American singer/songwriter", "Cuban ice skater")
- For a location: "[type of location] in [area/region/country as needed]" (Examples: "City in Florida, United States", "University in Oxford, England")
- For an organism: "[type of organism] of [common name or description]" (Examples: "Species of moth", "Group of flowering plants", "Extinct group of molluscs")
- Do not include family name or other technical taxonomic terms.
- Publication: "[year] [type of publication] by [author]" (Examples: "1983 novel by John Irving")
- Miscellaneous: "Type of [noun]", "Concept in [academic field]" (Examples: "Type of steam locomotive", "Concept in statistics")