| 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:
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
Inside ProtoWiki
In the ProtoWiki repo:
