wiki-signals

name

wiki-signals

description

A catalogue of real-data signals available on Wikipedia / Wikimedia projects — inference signals (revision counts, watchers, infobox shape), analytics (pageviews, top articles), links (incoming, outgoing, redirects, related), curation (featured articles, image of the day, on this day), attribution (license, brand marks, source-wiki metadata), and edit suggestions (Edit Check-style coaching, mockable from rules / Lift Wing). Use when picking what real data to surface in a prototype, asking "what could I show alongside this article?", or grounding a feature idea in observable signals.

Wiki signals

Wikipedia is a rich source of signals — much more than just article text. This skill is the catalogue of what's available. For how to fetch any specific signal, see wiki-apis.

The six families:

• references/inference.md — inference and ML signals.
• references/analytics.md — pageviews and related metrics from the Wikimedia metrics API.
• references/links.md — incoming / outgoing links, redirects, related articles.
• references/curation.md — Today's Featured Article, Picture of the Day, On This Day, Did You Know.
• references/attribution.md — off-wiki attribution (Attribution API beta). Full framework docs: wiki-attribution.
• edit-suggestions.md — VisualEditor "Edit Check" suggestions: which checks exist, how to mock the stream from fixtures / rules / Lift Wing, where the JSON lives. (ProtoWiki-only; not part of the FakeMediaWiki references/ mirrors.)

Why this catalogue exists: most Wikipedia prototypes only consume the article body. But the article as a node in a graph offers far more that grounds product ideas in real signals.

Quick map of signals

Signal	Surface	Skill reference
Article text / HTML	REST /page/html	wiki-apis
Lead summary + thumbnail	REST /page/summary	wiki-apis
Pageviews (article / aggregate / top)	Metrics REST	analytics.md
Watcher count	Action query&prop=info&inprop=watchers	inference.md
Recent contributors	Action query&prop=revisions&rvlimit=N	inference.md
Edit frequency	Action query&prop=revisions (count)	inference.md
Page age	Action query&prop=info (firstrevid)	inference.md
Stub / start / B / GA / FA	Categories + page-assessment data	inference.md
Infobox shape	Parse the rendered HTML — .infobox	inference.md
Outgoing links	Action query&prop=links	links.md
Incoming links (backlinks)	Action query&list=backlinks	links.md
Redirects to a page	Action query&list=backlinks&blfilterredir=redirects	links.md
Related articles	REST /page/related	links.md
Categories of a page	Action query&prop=categories	links.md
Pages in a category	Action query&list=categorymembers	links.md
Articles from category (related titles)

Don't fake what you can fetch

The principle: if a real signal is one HTTP call away, show real data. Fake data is acceptable for impossible / unbuilt signals ("imagine an LLM-generated topic strip") but for anything Wikipedia already has, fetching it grounds the prototype in real edge cases — long titles, multilingual surprises, missing thumbnails, weird redirect chains, RTL languages, cyrillic, and so on.

How signals compose into ideas

Examples of recent feature ideas grounded in two or more signals:

Feature	Signals
"Why this article is recommended to you"	related articles + pageviews + categories
"Hot edits this week"	recent revisions + pageviews + watcher count
"Articles that link here" panel	backlinks + summary + thumbnail
"Featured today across languages"	featured + interlanguage links
"Did this fact change?"	revisions + parsed infobox shape
Off-wiki answer card with proper credit	summary + attribution (license + brand marks + trust)
"Coach my edit" overlay	suggestion stream + tone prediction + diff preview

The catalogue isn't a feature list — it's the raw material for one.

See also

• references/README.md — index of the FakeMediaWiki-synced signal reference files in this folder.
• wiki-apis — how to actually fetch each of these.
• wiki-snapshot-data — when fetching every load is wasteful.

Inside ProtoWiki

In the ProtoWiki repo:

• The convention for committed Edit Check fixtures is public/edit-suggestions/<slug>.json, loaded at runtime via fetch. Nothing committed today — the folder is created the moment the first fixture lands. See edit-suggestions.md for how to author one.
• For the per-component contract that consumes those fixtures (payload shape, SuggestionCard, dismiss state, "apply" semantics), see protowiki-components/references/edit-suggestions.md.
• The off-wiki attribution stack lives in src/components/attribution/ and example-attribution-search. See wiki-attribution and protowiki-components/references/attribution.md.