Related discussion about a similar proposal here: T366567: REST: introduce audience designations (proposal), for context.

Would the beta module be assumed (by virtue of being named "beta") to contain only beta endpoints? Or would it also need to have a "vbeta" version, to follow the new pattern? If the latter, how does this url look to you?

• https://en.wiktionary.org/w/rest.php/beta/vbeta/page/Earth/history?older_than=84534952

Personally, I dislike it.

Exposition:

For illustration, I'm speculating we might create a beta version of PageHistoryHandler, which currently uses "older_than" and "newer_than" parameters to page through results (and for sake of example, I'll keep that parameter naming below, even though we may change it).

The current url invoking that handler looks something like (this actually works right now, none of the other urls below do):

• https://en.wiktionary.org/w/rest.php/v1/page/Earth/history?older_than=84534952

If we were invoking this as part of an imaginary "history" module instead of using the default module, it might look something like:

• https://en.wiktionary.org/w/rest.php/history/v1/page/Earth?older_than=84534952

That seems okay.

If we created a beta version of that endpoint in a "beta" module, with version "vBeta", it'd look something like:

• https://en.wiktionary.org/w/rest.php/beta/vbeta/page/Earth/history?older_than=84534952

That seems weird.

Alternatively, we could create speculative module names, and if they only had beta endpoints under them, then changing/removing them would be low consequence. A url under this pattern might look like:

• https://en.wiktionary.org/w/rest.php/history/vbeta/page/Earth/history?older_than=84534952

This means that, for any endpoint currently in the default module that we want to experiment with, we'd need to come up with a proposed actual module name, rather than being able to just drop it into a "beta" module. But I like that, as it lets us experiment with module names in a visible but non-committal way. The sooner we get everything out of the "default" module, the better. And creating a catch-all module for beta endpoints feels like an anti-pattern.