About [[MediaWiki:Apihelp-sitematrix-description/en]]

CLOSED This issue is closed

phab:T100459 gerrit:212925

The last sentence makes very little sense and should be clarified.

This refers to the fact that the dbname (like "commonswiki" or "svwiki") is made by the language code + project name for content projects and by subdomain + main domain for all the others.

I think your description is a lot clearer than the current message:

"The code is either the unique identifier for specials or, for languages, the project code."

Alternatively a combo such as:

"The code is either the language code + project code for content projects or the subdomain + main domain for all the others.

Are you sure you got this right? My understanding was that "code" refers to code field in the output. Now I'm confused. New wording says that "code" is "technically dbname/wikiid", but "dbname" is a separate field in the output, and field or parameter name "wikiid" doesn't seem to be present. Seems that now it's more like the description of "dbname" not "code". My advice is that we make it clear in the original message that "code" is an output field.

There are two different "code"s listed in the API: the first refers to the ISO 639 code of the project. The second refers to the project suffix ("wiki", "wikiquote" and so forth). It's definitely confusing (I created T100459) -- I'm not sure what this is supposed to really say, as the "language code + project code" it describes is actually the "dbname" field.

I think that for a start, to have less confusion, we could revert gerrit:212925.

Or we could improve the original sentence like this:

• "The code is either the unique identifier for specials or, for languages, the project code." →
• "The code for information about a site to return is either the unique identifier for specials or, for languages, the project code"

So it should be more clear that it's intended to describe the code in output for for "smsiteprop" parameter and not for "smlangprop" (see w:Special:ApiSandbox#action=sitematrix).

Whether API field(s) should be renamed (phab:T100459) would be a separate issue then.