Some of the Mobile Apps Team engineers met to discuss the scope of the MVP for a mobile apps content service.

Firstly, we enumerated our goals for this content service:

Minimise number of requests the app has to make to generate a page
Reduce payload size of requests
Abstract away from of the API logic contained in the client into the server instead
Do some of the transforms that are currently done on the client on the server instead, where appropriate

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

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?

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Garry

Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps

Wikimedia Foundation