Recent pages - requirements notes

2023-08-21: these notes from Peter Kaminski are copied from CSC Mattermost Massive-Wiki channel chat on the use cases for including extracts from recent pages on the "Recent pages" wiki page.

"Abstract" is a generalization. telescoping back from "displays the first 257 characters", what are we trying to help the reader with?

Possible answers:

• to help remind them what this page is about
• to help them decide whether they want to read this page
• to understand better what has happened with this page.

So then, possible implementations of some of those use cases include:

• extract the first 257 characters (without headers) (lede)
• extract the first five words of consecutive paragraphs, until you've accumulated 257 characters
• construct an extractive or abstractive summary of the whole page that fits into 257 characters
• don't focus on content, but rather changes; choose some way to pick the most important diff lines that fit into 257 characters
• etc.

Simplifying all that product management discussion and decisions, I think it's fine to go with "extract the first 257 characters (without headers) (lede)". But, I'd probably call it abstract, because even if the first implementation is the lede, maybe there will want to be more options later.