https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Ditch_crappy_API_formats
Accepted on November 12, 2014.
This will break wm-bot :( T73543: wm-bot should not use WDDX MediaWiki API format (format going away May 2015)
We briefly discussed this in the archcom today. The second step of execution here was scheduled for 12 November 2015, which is tomorrow. There doesn't seem to be a commit yet for this, is there?
I would recommend we announce this to relevant mailing lists as a reminder, and let it ride the deployment train over the course of next week. And for third party wikis, it will be releases as part of MediaWiki 1.27.0.
Some numbers for reference:
https://logstash.wikimedia.org/#/dashboard/elasticsearch/mediawiki channel:api-feature-usage message:format
Last 7 days:
| Term | Count |
|---|---|
| format=txt | 267564 |
| format=dbg | 138104 |
| format=txtfm | 56095 |
| format=yaml | 21914 |
| format=dbgfm | 19 |
| format=yamlfm | 13 |
For context, here is the overall 10 top:
https://logstash.wikimedia.org/#/dashboard/elasticsearch/mediawiki channel:api-feature-usage
Top 10 last 7 days:
| Term | Count |
|---|---|
| prop=langlinks&llurl | 9318987 |
| action=query&prop=revisions+base&generatexml | 1807708 |
| action=query&list=deletedrevs | 1142690 |
| unclear-"now"-timestamp | 559538 |
| action=tokens | 477398 |
| action=expandtemplates&!prop | 333121 |
| format=txt | 267581 |
| action=search&srprop=score | 170086 |
| format=dbg | 138072 |
| action=parse&generatexml | 75473 |
https://logstash.wikimedia.org/#/dashboard/elasticsearch/api-feature-usage might be slightly more useful, although in the end it's all the same data.
TL;DR summary is that hits are mostly IPs with little opportunity to contact whoever it is that's hitting these formats. There's maybe 4 where we have enough information that contact could even be possible.
Some analysis:
format=txt 267564
The top 100 is almost entirely IPs; I see one human user (who has tons of user scripts in their user .js) and one logged-in bot.
43% is coming from one IP with a generic agent, fetching extracts and pageinfo for seemingly-random articles.
10% is coming from various IPv6s that seem to belong to Facebook (they share a prefix and all include ":face:b00c:", and spot checking whois is consistent), generic agent exporting pages by pageid.
Another 9% is from one IP with a browser-like agent (probably fake), apparently fetching section 0 for US cities.
Another 8% is posts from an IP with an actually useful agent, best guess is it's a backend loading data for a phone app that matches the agent.
format=dbg 138104
99% is from one IP fetching page content with various agents, many from common web spiders. Almost certainly a live mirror of some sort.
format=txtfm 56095
96% from one IP with a generic agent, that seems to be fetching the top-revision timestamps for biographies on one wiki.
format=yaml 21914
82% requests with a "contact@" email address as the agent, at a domain that seems to be a brand monitoring/management company. Queries look like a strange way of getting HTML for various logos.
Another 9% has an agent attributing it to a particular bot. Actual queries seem to be just parsing the same page every 5 minutes.
format=dbgfm 19
format=yamlfm 13
So low it's not worth caring about.
Not that I know of. I'll make one.
I would recommend we announce this to relevant mailing lists as a reminder, and let it ride the deployment train over the course of next week. And for third party wikis, it will be releases as part of MediaWiki 1.27.0.
I'd rather give slightly more notice on the reminder: let's let it ride the train for 1.27.0-wmf.8 rather than 1.27.0-wmf.7.
Change 252742 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anomie):
Stop testing deprecated API formats
Change 252743 had a related patch set uploaded (by Anomie):
API: Remove dbg, txt, and yaml formats