Create a magic word to be used on English Wikipedia as an override for the display of the Wikidata short description in all of the places where the description is paired with English Wikipedia content, including on the apps, in search, and in Visual Editor's link module.
The model for this is the defaultsort magic word -- {{DEFAULTSORT:Big Sleep, The}} -- which is used in the wikitext on the article page to determine where the page title appears on category pages.
The new magic word should be {{SHORTDESC:1946 film by Howard Hawkes}}
When displaying the short description, the display should check to see if the magic word is filled in (not blank) in the English Wikipedia article. If there is a description on English Wikipedia, then that description should be used.
If the magic word isn't used on the page, or if the description is blank, then it should show the description from Wikidata.
"Blank" means:
- not having any description in the field {{SHORTDESC:}}
- just blank spaces {{SHORTDESC: }}
- just punctuation {{SHORTDESC:.}}
- just non-breaking space {{SHORTDESC: }}
In those cases, it should pull the description from Wikidata.
Once this override is live, Wikipedia editors will populate the magic word on pages where they want to override the description. If/when they write enough descriptions that it's roughly comparable to the number of existing Wikidata descriptions, we will change the system again, to only pull from the Wikipedia descriptions, and not use the descriptions on Wikidata as the default/fallback. At that point, on pages that don't have the magic word (or on pages where the description is left blank), there will be no description to display.
We're still talking about when that switch will happen -- the current plan is to switch when there are non-blank descriptions on 2 million article pages. That might happen quickly, or it might take a long time, depending on how the community chooses to use the magic word.