Hello,

This is a significant change announcement about the way entity labels are displayed in parsed edit summaries in API requests.

As a Wikidata editor, you may have noticed that links in edit summaries are formatted using the label of the linked entity, for example, [[Property:P460]]: [[Q112795079]] becomes “said to be the same as (P460) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P460: Wikidata Sandbox 4 (Q112795079) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q112795079”. However, this is disabled in API requests, initially done to fix a previous bug. This made it difficult for edit summaries to be understood outside of Wikidata.org, especially when shown in tools.

To address this issue, we have fixed the original bug and will now enable the display of entity labels in parsed edit summaries in API requests. API requests that return edit summaries will now show formatted links with entity labels, including action=query + prop=revisions + rvprop=parsedcomment.

We have already deployed this change to Test Wikidata, where you can test it now (example API request https://test.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=revisions&revids=636981&formatversion=2&rvprop=comment%7Cparsedcomment). We will deploy it to Wikidata on or shortly after May 18th.

We assume that users who analyze edit summaries to determine what changed in an edit generally use the unparsed comment (e.g., /* wbsetclaim-update:2||1|1 */ [[Property:P460]]: [[Q112795079]]), which will be unaffected.

Please let us know on this phabricator ticket https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T327062 if you have any questions or concerns.

Cheers,