Wikimedia Apps/App Services

Problems

• Multiple round trips to retrieve data for a single view
  • concrete examples needed
• Payloads are unnecessarily large due to unused fields in the response.
  • concrete examples needed
• Lack of cache control data to remove/simplify client-side cache invalidation.
• All aggregation and transformation is done multiple times (once for each client).

MVP Scope

We decided that the scope of the service should be feature parity; the service should be a drop-in replacement for our current API calls. More concretely, this means it should give us:

• Data from mobileview
  • Wikidata description
  • Revision ID of page
  • Wikibase ID
• Image meta data for all images in the page
• License
• Description
• Includes the URL for the high resolution version used for the lead image
• Exclude unused HTML
  • Navboxes, etc.
• Exclude hidden elements
  • CSS: display: none; unless if we display later
• Related articles suggestions from full text search API

Beyond MVP

Things which we want to add, but are out of scope for the first iteration:

• Arbitrary Wikidata properties
• Disambiguation (already "transcluded", following the chain of disambiguation pages and returning a JSON array of those links)
• Page issues
• Interwiki links
• Table of contents (as a JSON array)

Open questions

• Versioning? What if we add or remove a field from the response? We should version this. Can we do this easily?