Expose Wikipedia short descriptions for suggestions
Categories
(Firefox :: Search, enhancement, P5)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: quasicomputational, Unassigned)
Details
Wikipedia has 'short descriptions' (on-wiki description]), which are potted descriptions of an article's topic suitable for display in a suggestion UI. The Wikipedia search interface shows them, and they're quite nice.
Firefox's suggestions could learn the same trick. I don't know if the OpenSearch format is up to the job, or if the Wikimedia servers expose the short descriptions in a convenient way. It might require talking to the Wikimedia people.
Hi quasicomputational,
Thank you for the suggestion, this seems like a great idea to me!
I'm not sure they are the same entitity, but description field in the Wiki REST API looks just as good as short descriptions you mention.
Here's an example of a request to this API, it returns a string: "A country in Eastern Europe":
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ukraine
I tagged Nive, a PM on the Suggest team who would be a better judge of what's feasible in Suggest though.
I also wanted to add a link to Mozilla Connect here. This is Mozilla's new platform for handling product ideas and enhancements requests, and relevant area PMs regularly review suggestions there. It also allows other users to vote for ideas and asks, and highest-voted ones inform out backlog (e.g., the team I'm on is now working on a user-suggested improvement from Connect).
|
||
Comment 2•3 years ago
|
||
Thanks for the suggestion, Tito has already added this to the list of things to think about for Suggest.
To document what I looked at earlier, the OpenSearch API that Firefox uses for Wikipedia suggestions does not currently return the short descriptions - there were performance issues and so it was disabled due to that and that no browsers were using it at the time. If we do this, we'd need to get that re-enabled or use their other APIs (which would need consideration & work).
Description
•