Make this page more of a reference doc than a user guide. The information here should be quickly and easily accessible to readers. Much of the contextual information is unnecessary for application developers who visit the page for simple information.

OTOH, making it a reference doc might leave it no purpose that's not already served by https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php#main/datatypes.

@Anomie that is a really good point. It makes me wonder what purpose https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Data_formats serves, if we already have a reference to point to? I wonder if we just point to https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php#main/datatypes from the FAQ page and/or elsewhere, could we retire this page?

That said, my inclination is almost always to reduce the number of pages with duplicate information. If there is a good reason to keep it, we should.

As I've said elsewhere, I like to think of the auto-generated documentation as the reference card and the on-wiki documentation as the user guide. If there's no need for user guide content for something, then there may not need to be an on-wiki page at all (or just a stub).

Changes made to API:Data_formats:

• Reworded some phrases for clarity.
• Reduced text and moved some sentences to "Additional notes" to make the most important information quickly accessible.
• Re-organized the output section to create a "flow".