Topic on Talk:Core Platform Team/Initiative/Core REST API in MediaWiki/Epics, User Stories, and Requirements

There exist a couple of clients that fetch previews of pages that I know of. The iOS app shows a preview if you long press a link IIRC and Page Previews shows a preview if you hover over a link.

When Page Previews was deployed to all of the Wikipedias, we understood that we were introducing a different way to interact with their content. We instrumented that interaction in such a way that it could be reported on like the more traditional pageview interaction. We call this interaction a virtual pageview. In August there were 15.7 billion pageviews and 1.6 billion virtual pageviews by users (see the description of the agent_type column at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake/Traffic/Webrequest#wmf.webrequest) across all projects.

Please consider adding this use case into epic #1, either by folding it into use case 1 or adding a distinct one, e.g.

As a Reader, I want to get a preview of a page so that I can use the additional information to help me better understand a subject.

As a Reader, I want to get a preview of a page so that I can make a quick, informed decision about jumping into a topic related to a subject.

These are really good user stories. I wasn't aware of the scale of page previews. AMAZING.

I don't think any of the other user stories in this "Core REST API" are implemented as extensions currently (but I haven't checked against that very carefully). Does it make sense to instead have the Extension:Popups provide these routes?

That's a great point, @EProdromou (WMF). It'd be a boon to have the definition of a page preview and the viewer of that preview be defined in one place.

It makes, therefore, sense to keep this use case distinct from the Core REST API in MediaWiki despite it being a core method of interaction.