| daniel added a comment. |
In T92961#2577993, @Pfps wrote:There is nothing preventing the dump format from having the first JSON object be information about the dump, including version of the dump format, version of wikidata format, time of dump, etc.
As long as this JSON object did not conform to the form of JSON objects that encode Wikidata entities this change would not be a breaking change!
Of course it would by a breaking change. There is no formal spec of the JSON dump beyond the spec for the individual entities, but we have always said that the dump is a set (an array) of entities. Putting something in there that is not an entity will break consumers.
If we are going to break the format, I prefer to introduce a proper envelope with a clear place for meta-data.
Note however that for the Special:EntityData interface, we have a similar but different problem: There we have only a single entity object, with no array or other structure around it. We can easily put the meta-info into the object itself, but that is semantically ugly. We are already mixing info about the page (revision, timestamp, etc) with the item data. Adding meta-info about the file would be possible, but would increase the mess.
So we might want to introduce a similar envelop structure there - which would be a pretty huge breaking change to the interface we use to resolve URIs. That's not to be taken lightly. Even if we introduce version info into the URL, we can't change the URIs, so clients would still get an unexpected data structure.
I'm afraid we painted ourselves into a corner here...
Cc: Pfps, aude, Smalyshev, Ricordisamoa, Addshore, Lydia_Pintscher, adrianheine, JanZerebecki, daniel, Tobi_WMDE_SW, Aklapper, D3r1ck01, Izno, Wikidata-bugs, Mbch331
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
