"As a Reader, I want to get a short page description, so that I can know the basic information about the subject of the page."

This is a user story for a unified page description API. It's modeled here as a separate entity rather than a property of the Page object, per the REST API design principles.

The interface should be the same whether the description comes from Wikidata or from a local page property.

This should fetch the description from either the 'shortdesc' page prop, if this wiki uses local descriptions, or from Wikidata, if it uses Wikidata descriptions.

See T259622 for configuration options.

GET /page/{title}/description

Returns the description of the page.

Notable request headers: None

Request body: empty

Status:
200 – return the description
403 - user isn't authorized to read the description
404 – page does not exist (never created or deleted)

Notable response headers: none

Body: JSON

• description: The description of the page, string, plain text (no wikitext or HTML markup)