Hello,

Since the early days of REST API it provides two features that haven’t been widely used neither internally in the WMF nor by the community. Today in a clean-up pass over the API we have decided to deprecate and eventually remove those features to allow some long-needed refactorings and stability improvements of other, more important, endpoints.

The first one is the ability to query metadata about the page via the `/page/title/{title}`~[1] endpoint. The metadata includes properties like the latest revision number of the page, user who have made the last edit, whether the page is a redirect and similar. The backend storage model used to power the feature is quite unique in the system and has a significant maintenance cost without providing a clear benefit to users.

Another feature that’s never found it’s audience is the ability to get listings of revisions, titles and renders stored in RESTBase. These listings suffer from scaling issues and cannot work reliably with the data model we have.

We have, hence, opted to remove these unused and complex endpoints until there is some actual need for this data in the REST API when we can design and implement them better. Here’s the list of endpoints that are now deprecated and will be removed on May, 1st 2017:

        • /page/title/
        • /page/title/{title}
        • /page/title/{title}/
        • /page/revision/
        • /page/revision/{revision}

In case you are using them please switch to using the MediaWiki Action API. In case you need assistance or have questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact the Wikimedia Services team~[2].

Best regards,
Petr Pchelko
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_page_title_title
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Services


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