API JSON format for warnings - Wikidata-tech

28 Aug 2015

Hi,

I am wondering how errors and warnings are reported through the API, and 
which errors and warnings are possible. There is some documentation on 
Wikidata errors [1], but I could not find documentation on how the 
warning messages are communicated in JSON. I have seen structures like this:

{ "warnings" :
   {"wbeditentity":
     {"messages":
        [{"name":"wikibase-self-conflict-patched",
          "parameters":[],
          "html": { "*":"Your edit was patched into the latest
version, 
overriding some of your own intermediate changes."}
        }]
     }
   }
}

I don't know how to provoke more warnings, or multiple warnings in one 
request, so I found it hard to guess how this pattern generalises. Some 
questions:

* What is the purpose of the map with the "*" key? Which other keys but 
"*" could this map have?
* The key "wbeditentity" points to a list. Is this supposed to encode 
multiple warnings of this type?
* I guess the "name" is a message name, and "parameters" are message 
"arguments" (as they are called in action="query") for the message?
* Is this the JSON pattern used in all warnings or can there also be 
other responses from wbeditentity?
* Is this the JSON pattern used for warnings in all Wikibase actions or 
can there also be other responses from other actions?
* Is there a list of relevant warning codes anywhere?
* Is there a list of relevant error codes anywhere? The docs in [1] 
point to paraminfo (e.g., 
http://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=paraminfo&modules=wbeditentity) 
but there are no errors mentioned there.

Thanks,

Markus

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/API#Errors