Hello,
This is an announcement for a significant, but not breaking, change to the
response format of the wbsearchentities API. So far, each search result has
included "label" or "description" members- which included the
label/description of the matched entity- so that it could be shown to
users. However, these were plain strings with no indication of the language
of the label or description: if language fallback happened (e.g. if the
search was in Arabic, but the item only had an English description), then
there would be no indication of this in the response. Users of the API
couldn’t know what the language of the returned label/description was
without a separate API call to retrieve the entity’s data. This is for
example necessary for screen readers to read out the label/description in
the correct language. (We will follow up with other changes to make use of
it in the Wikibase UI, so that screen readers there are getting a better
indication of which language to read out.)
We have resolved this with the addition of a new "display" member to the
search result structure, which contains a "label" and "description"
that
are not plain strings, but rather objects with "language" and "value"
members (like labels and descriptions in the normal JSON serialization
<https://doc.wikimedia.org/Wikibase/master/php/md_docs_topics_json.html#json_fingerprint>).
The old "label" and "description" fields are still there, but
deprecated:
we recommend that you don’t use them in new code. Please note that, just
like the "label" and "description" were always optional (i.e. could
be
missing for entities that had no label or description available in the
request language or a fallback language), so the "label" and
"description"
in the new response are also optional (under the same conditions).
This change was already deployed to Beta Wikidata, Test Wikidata, and
Wikidata. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to let us
know in this ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T104344>.
Cheers,
--
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager for Wikidata/Wikibase*
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
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