Talk:Page Content Service/Flow

Under "Page previews content/Text", the page for the Popups extension says:

For third parties we encourage using the Page Content Service to enjoy using Popups with your local wiki. You can also use the Extension:TextExtracts extension. This extension has various caveats and we do not actively support use of this API.

I came across this when I deployed the Popups extension to Icannwiki earlier tonight and saw that, while some popups worked, most I tried did not. To see this, compare "ASCII" (working) and "DNS" (fails) under Internationalized Domain Name. I did some digging, and, not finding any obvious errors on the server, I went to look at the documentation. That's when I found the above quote and then the (seemingly) contradictory statements from @Jdforrester (WMF) below.

If we are really meant to not use the TextExtracts extension, it would help to outline how to set up PCS. Alternatively, maybe there is a list of tasks in phabricator that we can attack.

I agree that people shouldn't try to use the Popups extension, for various reasons, of which setting up your own PCS endpoint is probably the largest. You could file a task with the Web team asking for them to make the backing infrastructure requirements more generalisable, but I don't think there's any existing task about this.

The DNS page appears to be misusing a Table as a presentation-styling method. That's probably confusing the software, and I'd suggest trying to import a simple template that does the job properly, with divs, instead. E.g. wikt:Template:tocright looks like it might be fine to use.

Not a lot of information here about how this can be used on a non-Wikimedia project, even though references to this page seem to imply that it can be used on such a project (See the notice on Extension:TextExtracts). I'm trying to figure out how to automatically create description meta tags on my wiki for when pages are linked, and this site always seems to point me back here, but with no information on how to proceed.

The PCS doesn't provide the meta tags on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar, it provides https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Foobar and https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Foobar and similar. To a first approximation, none of the code is re-usable outside of Wikimedia, though it could probably be generalised at a cost of performance.

Ok, so then this doesn't provide the description meta tags, correct? And even if it did, the Page Content Service isn't usable outside Wikimedia anyways, right? Perhaps that should be clarified then. Thanks anyways!

Correct.

There's very little context here for MediaWiki users coming from 1.27 LTS. The linked Page Content Service Project Google Doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/15EAaDwK70i2pT4Xkj2Kdp9Q8XsYKGUQkJTSj5Rq8xiE/edit is not public. There's no information on this page about whether this is built into MediaWiki, an extension, or an external service, and if an extension or external service where to find it or how to install or configure it.

It's a service designed and built for Wikimedia. How did you come to read it, and what problem were you hoping it might solve? Maybe there's an alternative to which I could point you.