Nearby item descriptions not working in v2.5.0 (beta)

[misaochan]

Posting on behalf of @VojtechDostal who is unable to do so at the moment:

Item descriptions in Nearby Places do not work for him after the recent patch. For instance, this description used to beinstance of (P31)(which admittedly isn't the best description, haha, but still) but now only says ?

[VojtechDostal]

Thanks for posting this.

[misaochan]

Does anyone still encounter this in the current master build?

[VojtechDostal]

I still do.

[misaochan]

Thanks for the feedback @VojtechDostal . We'll try to work on this ASAP.

[maskaravivek]

I am unable to find a issue with item descriptions not showing up in general. Is the issue specific to this particular data point? Also the last change in the query was done in May itself ie during the hackathon.

@VojtechDostal I tried to reproduce the issue by checking places around the item posted in the screenshot. Somehow that item doesn't show up in my list.

• Can you help me with its geo coordinates.
• Also as you are good with queries it would be great if you could give a link to this item's wikidata entry.

[VojtechDostal]

I think this problem is language-specific. If your language is English, you won't have problems. But my app loads in Czech and is unable to retrieve Czech descriptions even if they exist.

Will explore the problem more in the morning.

[nicolas-raoul]

Please note that what is shown on the screenshot above as "description" is actually not the item's description, but the label of the class of which the item is an instance of. In this case it is "gymnasium", which has a Czech label, so there is still a problem.

The Wikidata query gives the correct class label.

NearbyController.loadAttractionsFromLocation sends the language in the Java's locale format, whose codes Javadoc says it should not be relied on.
On the other side, Wikidata expects a language from this list.
For Czech, the first one is "cs" or "ces" or "cze" depending on the variant, and the second one is "cs".
That might be the problem?

[VojtechDostal]

Thanks @nicolas-raoul for explanation. I did not know the description is based on P31. In that case it is clear that it's not just a language-specific problem. Look at @maskaravivek 's screenshot from yesterday. For example, the "Orlová (usedlost)" item (Q30067555) has a P31 "homestead" which should show in English. But instead it says "no description found".

Why does it only work for "Pěvecká konzervatoř Praha" (Q12047866), which it correctly says is a secondary school based on instance? I don't know.

[maskaravivek]

Thanks @nicolas-raoul @nicolas-raoul. Lots of insights from your comments about this issue. Should help us fix the queries for all languages.

[nicolas-raoul]

Our query works (giving "usedlost") if the language is cs.
But it also works (giving "Seosko gospodarstvo") when using the language codes iamsurethiscodedoesnotexist.

So it is not the problem I was thinking about. There must be another problem.
Could someone get the HTTP request/response when that happens? It would tell us on what side is the problem. Thanks!

[misaochan]

Errr... I think I might have solved this while working on Nearby uploads. It appears that we are calling place.getDescription().getText(); to get the description, but getDescription() actually returns an enum (which is used for selecting the icon), and I don't think getText() is converting that appropriately. Instead, AFAIK, what we really want is the longDescription .

The PR I submitted solves the problem for me. I had initially included it in my feature branch, but figured I should submit this to master now so people can test it and to prevent others from wasting further time on it (if my PR indeed works).

Could anyone (especially those with a non-English phone language) help test and see? Thanks!