Language links added by Wikidata are currently stored in the parser
cache and in the langlinks table in the database, which means they
work the same as in-page langlinks but also that the page must be
reparsed if these wikidata langlinks change. The Wikidata team has
proposed to remove the necessity for the page reparse, at the cost of
changing the behavior of the API with regard to langlinks.
Gerrit change 59997[1] (still in review) will make the following
behavioral changes:
* action=parse will return only the in-page langlinks by default.
Inclusion of Wikidata langlinks may be requested using a new
parameter.
* list=allpages with apfilterlanglinks will only consider in-page langlinks.
* list=langbacklinks will only consider in-page langlinks.
* prop=langlinks will only list in-page langlinks.
Gerrit change 60034[2] (still in review) will make the following
behavioral changes:
* prop=langlinks will have a new parameter to request inclusion of the
Wikidata langlinks in the result.
A future change, not coded yet, will allow for Wikidata to flag its
langlinks in various ways. For example, it could indicate which of the
other-language articles are Featured Articles.
At this time, it seems likely that the first change will make it into
1.22wmf3.[3] The timing of the second and third changes are less
certain.
[1]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/59997
[2]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/60034
[3]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap
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Brad Jorsch
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
It was recently noticed[1] that the xmldoublequote parameter to
format=xml has been broken since r55641,[2] merged in August 2009 and
released with MediaWiki 1.16. Since it has been broken for over 3.5
years, it was decided to just remove the parameter.[3]
Background: The xmldoublequote parameter was added in response to bug
11401,[4] as a workaround for the fact that XPath 1.0 did not specify
any mechanism for escaping quotes in string literals. It caused all
attribute values and text content to be double-encoded, e.g. a double
quote would be represented as ", and an ampersand would be
represented as &.
Workaround: XPath 2.0, released in 2007, does include a quoting
mechanism. Clients using XPath 1.0 may use string concatenation as a
workaround.[5]
[1]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46626
[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/55641
[3]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/58261/
[4]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11401
[5]: e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6937525/escaping-xpath-literal-with-pyth…
--
Brad Jorsch
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation