Problem statement

As a developer using the MediaWiki Core REST API to access Wikimedia projects (directly or via the API Gateway), I want to stay up to date with changes to the API.

Background

While the versioning policy protects developers from breaking changes to the API, developers may still want to know about new endpoints, new capabilities, and new versions. For developers using the API to access third-party MediaWiki installations, the MediaWiki changelog provides this information. However, since Wikimedia projects get the latest updates to MediaWiki, API changes are available for use far before they are shipped in a major MediaWiki release.

Discussion questions

• Are there are precedents for maintaining separate changelogs for components within MediaWiki Core?
• Is it feasible to maintain something like this?
• Should we store this changelog on wiki or both on wiki and in source control? Is there a way to automatically publish the changelog from source control on wiki, such as Extension:GitHub?
• How can we make the changelog more visible for API implementers?

Changelog draft

May 28, 2020[1] - Search endpoints now available
v1 now includes endpoints that allow you to search wiki pages and autocomplete a page title. See the [docs] to get started.

[1] To determine the date that a change was deployed to all Wikimedia projects, I searched mediawiki.org for the first 8 digits of the change ID to find the MediaWiki version, and then used the deployment roadmap to find the date that the change was deployed to all projects.