Handling wikitext in a structured way is an interesting concept, as far as I know the team working on the new visual editor (another joint project between the Foundation and Wikia) has built a "parsoid" that does something pretty much similar if not the same, that functionality could be exposed as an API resource, for more information feel free to drop them an email (I'm not sure there's a dedicated mailing list).
That being said, it would be of great interest to get implementation details about the suggestions focusing on the concept that introducing all the stated goals/benefits/features would be easy without introducing breaking changes, it's unclear on which basis that assessment is done in the complete absence of technical details (all the documentation published so far is made up just of notes listing concepts by name).
On a side note, a simpler, normalized URI schema (URL is too restrictive, in the end REST is not at all about HTTP) would make it possible to also fully exploit OAuth's scopes and add a caching layer such as Squid/Varnish maintaining the possibility of purging when needed (that's not really doable when the URI schema is too relaxed).
On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński
<matma.rex@gmail.com> wrote:
2012/11/10 Federico "Lox" Lucignano <federico@wikia-inc.com>:
> Concerning versioning, despite I agree that no system is able to keep
> backwards compatibility forever (as any software solution reaches the end of
> its' lifecycle sooner or later depending on how manageable it is to keep
> updating/improving it), how you implement versioning in an API is actually a
> very important factor for ensuring future backwards compatibility: when an
> hypothetical /rest/v2/xyz resource would be made available, the previous
> /rest/v1/xyz would be left intact, where the v2 xyz resource could be a
> direct descendant of v1 to avoid code duplication and simplify maintenance
> tasks.
You could also add a "api" URL parameter to the current API that would
default to "v1", and possibly accept other values like "v2" for new
versions. ("version" parameter is already taken; I think we could live
with it.)
No need to change the entire URL format.
-- Matma Rex
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Federico "Lox" Lucignano
Senior Lead Engineer - Mobile Team
Wikia sp.z.o.o.