Hello all,

This is an announcement for a breaking change to the output format of the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API, to go live on 6 May 2019 (most likely around 12:00 UTC). It affects all clients that use the wbcheckconstraints API action.

We are adding a new status for constraints, in addition to regular constraints and mandatory constraints: suggestion constraints indicate possible improvements to a statement, but are not inherently problematic like other constraint violations. This implies a new status for constraint results as well: in addition to 'violation' for violations of mandatory constraints and 'warning' for violations of regular constraints, as well as several statuses that are not violations, there is now 'suggestion' for violations of suggestion constraints. The default value of the status API parameter is changed to include this status as well (from violation|warning|bad-parameters to violation|warning|suggestion|bad-parameters), and it can appear as the "status" of a result in the response.

API consumers that are not interested in suggestion constraints can specify a non-default value for the status API parameter, e. g. the old default violation|warning|bad-parameters, to avoid getting responses including this status. Others should decide how to handle it, and update their code accordingly if necessary.

According to our stable interface policy, the change will be enabled 4 weeks after this announcement, on May 6th, and a test system will be set up latest on April 17th on test.wikidata.org.

If you have any question or issue, let us know in the related ticket.

Cheers,