| MZMcBride added a comment. |
From the current task description:
Problem: There is currently no canonical URI/URL for referring to and retrieving these data sets.
Can someone please elaborate on this? This task has a whole lot of text about potential solutions and it's not clear to me why a "nice" URL is needed at all. I don't follow the use-cases mentioned in T161527#3135095:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/data/Avignon_City_Wall as canonical URI (we can add .map if it's important, but if we can avoid it, it looks nicer without it). This URI would be redirected to the following places [...]
Who's going to be typing this URL or using it? Actual readers and users? Why does the URL need to look nice?
If the idea is for computer code to access these URLs, who cares if the URL is "ugly"? I don't ever give any thought to whether an api.php URL looks clean or not, for example. Plus api.php URLs, with their standardized and supported query strings, can support arbitrary additions like &format=json that make the request more explicit than "data" about what's going to come back to the client from the server. What's wrong with query strings?
If the idea really is for human beings and real-life users to be using these /data/ URLs, personally I would think that you would want to support the simplest URL transformation possible, as I often am forced to mangle a URL by hand. (You should see me trying to add 2000 to a Phabricator Maniphest URL that's using a Bugzilla ID.) Replacing "wiki" in the URL with "data" could be somewhat convenient if the page title is used. But again, it's really unclear to me who the audience is, given that most users don't pay any attention to pretty URLs at all. Most users also rarely type URLs. And it's not clear to me why a regular user would want to access the raw data about an entity anyway.
(It feels like we're discussing programmatic access and computers really do not care about pretty URLs. As I said to Tim after office hours, the last resort argument of people to defend pretty URLs is then to say, well the URL is used for caching!)
Cc: MZMcBride, Rybesh, Dzahn, GWicke, tstarling, Aklapper, Jonas, Smalyshev, mkroetzsch, Lydia_Pintscher, daniel, QZanden, D3r1ck01, Izno, suriyaa, Eevans, mobrovac, Hardikj, Wikidata-bugs, aude, jayvdb, Southparkfan, fbstj, RobLa-WMF, santhosh, Mbch331, Jay8g, Ltrlg, Glaisher, bd808, Krenair, Legoktm
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