Hi all!
Wikidata (technically, Wikibase) uses a lot of JS/API based editing, and we have
several times hit upon the question of how to best report errors from the API.
I'll try to break the issue down into several concrete questions. But first off,
the status quo as I understand it:
* errors are reported using an error code (a string) and a free form error
message. The message is usually not internationalized, though sometimes it is.
* warnings are reported as free form text.
* Additional information can be added to both errors and warnings, but there is
no standard way to do this.
* Errors exposed by the API are often not generated but just passed through by
the API; Typically, a generic error code is used with the original error message
(e.g. from an exception).
So, here are my questions:
* Should error messages returned by the API be translated? Or should the
translation be left to JavaScript in the client?
** In both cases, it would be nice to have a consistent relationship between
error codes and the corresponding system message.
** If translation is done on the client, we need to pass any message parameters
separately.
** The message key would have to somehow be derived or mapped from the error code.
* When using system messages to translate the error codes from the API, these
messages will often contain wikitext. How can we best avoid this? Wikitext is
likely to be quite useless to the client - it would be better to return HTML; or
pass all the message keys and parameters, and let the client generate the message.
* Status objects are often used to collect errors and warnings the occur while
trying to perform some task. It would be nice if the API would provide a
standard way to put the contents of a Status object into the result (well, at
least the errors and warnings).
Any thoughts on that?
-- daniel