Mobile web projects/Collections Extract Api Spike

Collection Overview ( A collection page list )

A page listed is in summarized card view with the following information:

Title and Extract which is limited to two sentences or 140 characters with ellipsis

See https://trello.com/c/gyQmr588/7-spike-extracts-api for spike deliverables.

Example Query:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&format=json&exsentences=2&exsectionformat=plain&indexpageids=&pageids=18483349|9105985|4030456|39532875|24283208

Does the existing API support what we want to do?
Sort of. Supplying list of page ids will return page titles and configured extract of the page. However, upon investigation this is problematic for pages with Templates prior to any text content. See above link for results. Note that pages with templates prior to content or pages completely generated by templates return no extract.

If we clip to 2 sentences how useful are the extracts generated?
Assuming API returns two sentences (see above), it seems reasonable that they would be useful. Requesting plain format effectively strips wikitext. However, in some cases HTML is present. Though is not difficult to strip.

Are there any performance problems with this. How many can we safely retrieve on a list page view?
It seems not. Assuming we have a list of page ids, page view would make one API request.