Legoktm has just merged Gerrit change 160798,[1] Gerrit change 161093,[2] Gerrit change 160819,[3] and a few associated patches. Collectively, these make the following changes to the human-readable aspects of the API output, which will be deployed to WMF wikis with 1.25wmf4 (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.25/Roadmap for the schedule).

* action=help now outputs a nice HTML page instead of a plain-text document wrapped in XML. * Hitting api.php with no parameters will display help for the main module only, with links to each submodule. One of the examples provided shows how to get everything on one page as with the old help. * The default for the 'format' parameter is now jsonfm rather than xmlfm. * Syntax highlighting for format=jsonfm and format=xmlfm now uses Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi rather than ad-hoc code that only worked right for xmlfm. Other formats are not highlighted.

The patches also change the aspects of action=paraminfo that return help-related information: * Module description is no longer returned by default; a new parameter selects html, wikitext, or raw Message data. * The 'examples' result property is now an array rather than a string. * The 'allexamples' result property has been removed. * Parameter descriptions are no longer returned by default; a new parameter selects html, wikitext, or raw Message data. Machine-readable parameter info remains available.

The impact of these changes on existing bots and scripts is expected to be minimal, as non-human consumption is likely to be limited to ApiSandbox.

[1]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160798 [2]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/161093 [2]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160819