On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 3:29 PM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Probably a good idea. Is it opt-in or opt-our for the API consumer?

-Adam


Thats the main question :)  To copy the dialog from gerrit:

> Anomie wrote:
> Should the ability to set this flag be exposed to the API somehow?
>
> Or, to avoid changing things for clients, perhaps that should be "should the
> ability to not set this flag be exposed to the API somehow?" since the API 
> hasn't done any query rewriting before?

> Ebernhardson wrote:
> As for the default, The current scope of rewriting is very small, we are only
> applying it to situations where the original query returned no results and the
> original query didn't contain any special syntax(such as quotes, incategory: etc).
> We might investigate doing heavier rewriting in the future (hasn't been
> considered yet), but for this quarter we are focusing specifically on returning
> answers to queries that return no results.
>
> As this only effects queries that didn't have a result anyways, i think it should
> be safe to apply as a default and allow api consumers to opt out.

> Anomie wrote:
> OTOH, someone might be running a bot that searches for a common typo and 
> fixes it. Once all the instances of the typo are fixed, your rewriting might cause
> it to return search results for the un-typoed version, causing the bot to at best
> waste bandwidth by fetching many pages that don't need any edit (and in worse
> cases it might make annoying minor edits or otherwise misbehave).

I thought it might be useful to get more opinions than our two.

Erik B.