A call to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=json&prop=revisions&meta=&titles=Main+Page
shows the user who edited the page last. It however omits their gender.
Gender is important for localisation. Please expose it in the response.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolved | Jdlrobson | T103362 Try to get rid of mobileview call for regular pages | |||
| Open | None | T172228 User gender should be exposed in revision information (user gender rvprop) |
This information is already available via the API, using list=users. I'm wary of including bunches of extra information in otherwise-unrelated responses "for localization".
But if this were to be done, the proper way would be to do it across the API everywhere a user name is returned (i.e. using a helper function), not just ad hoc in prop=revisions because that's the one place you happen to need it at the moment.
At any rate, at the code level this would also want some consideration to be able to avoid potentially making 5000 selects for the gender of one user each (better to make 1 select for the gender of 5000 users).
I'm wary of including bunches of extra information in otherwise-unrelated responses "for localization
I'm confused. Our apps/web want to render diffs and last modified information which respects the gender of our editors. How is that unrelated? In the mean time we are assuming their gender is unknown which is not great.
But if this were to be done, the proper way would be to do it across the API everywhere a user name is returned (i.e. using a helper function), not just ad hoc in prop=revisions because that's the one place you happen to need it at the moment.
That sounds great and a good opportunity to improve MediaWiki's code for everyone working with it.
Our watchlist JS wants to display a localized "This page has been added to your watchlist" message in a little popup when someone clicks the 'watch' button, but we removed the returning of the parsed message from action=watch because action=watch isn't the place for that. This seems like a similar situation, even though it's not amenable to the same solution used for that 'watched' message.
Perhaps the ideal thing to do here would be to implement T16027: Implement user generators into the API, particularly along the lines mentioned in T16027#3524520.
@Mholloway this seems like something we could put in the user dictionary in the metadata response at least. What do you think?
@Fjalapeno Ah, the page metadata endpoint doesn't currently return any user info but I see that last editor info is something that was being considered. Yeah, I think it could be useful. If we do want to do that, the easiest way to get gender for now would be just to do a follow-up list=users query. I wouldn't really want to do it that way in one of the hotter endpoints like /page/summary, but in /page/metadata we could probably get away with it.
Seems like we can take this on then when we have some down time… no rush, but just make sure we have that user dictionary in the meta endpoint where we can add this.
Untagging PI and tagging Platform Engineering for consideration of the original feature request for ApiQueryRevisions.