Pablo-WMDE added a comment.
The documented decision <https://github.com/wmde/wikibase-rest-api-proposal/blob/master/DECISION-RESEARCH.md#resources-in-plural-vs-singular> was about consistently using singular or plural for all path parts across resources - anticipating the notorious debate "singular or plural". The idea of consistently using plural for endpoints returning collections and singular for individual resources was not mentioned in this context at all. The idea is a new concept to me. After a fair amount of unsuccessful searching I'd be interested in links to popular examples of that approach (and ideally arguments which compare approaches). To me it sounds a bit like combining the disadvantages of both sides (having inconsistent plurality & removing the "hackability" of a - by definition hierarchical - path <https://twitter.com/pctgrass/status/1276166742990086149>). As a supporting argument why "consistency" (in the original interpretation) in this case may not be a goal worth striving for, the desire for linking to be built into the API (e.g. HAL <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Application_Language>) was mentioned - that way client applications would not need any knowledge of URLs and would receive them as part of the responses (and hence not care about having to construct different ones for single entities or collections). The linking topic was mentioned but documented as out of scope <https://github.com/wmde/wikibase-rest-api-proposal/blob/master/SCOPE.md#response-links>. I think this argument could go both ways - if nobody has to know the paths, why make the effort of differentiating. Picking up the discussion around the linking in the future again (ideally before transitioning to the implementation phase) sounds like a very worthwhile task irrespective of plurality to me however. I'll see if I have ideas to further improve the documentation about the plurality decisions so far. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T264550 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: Pablo-WMDE Cc: Addshore, Pablo-WMDE, Silvan_WMDE, Aklapper, Akuckartz, darthmon_wmde, Nandana, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, LawExplorer, _jensen, rosalieper, Scott_WUaS, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Lydia_Pintscher, Mbch331
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