wbformatentities with generate=text/plain HTML-escapes some characters
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Authored By

	LucasWerkmeister
	May 31 2025, 12:58 PM

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

Have or create an entity with an & in the label, such as P6562 on Wikidata
Call the action=wbformatentities API to format it in plain text, e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbformatentities&format=json&ids=P6562&generate=text%2Fplain&formatversion=2

What happens?:
The & is escaped:

{
    "wbformatentities": {
        "P6562": "Google Play Movies &amp; TV ID"
    },
    "success": 1
}

What should have happened instead?:
It should not be escaped, as the output is plain text.

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
This was noticed during a Tool-wdactle playing section at Wikidata and Sister Projects 2025.

	Subject	Repo	Branch	Lines +/-
	repo: Skip HTML post-processing for plain text output	mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase	master	+7 -5

Change #1152400 had a related patch set uploaded (by Lucas Werkmeister; author: Lucas Werkmeister):

[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] repo: Skip HTML post-processing for plain text output

Change #1152400 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase@master] repo: Skip HTML post-processing for plain text output

Looks fixed \o/

{
    "wbformatentities": {
        "P6562": "Google Play Movies & TV ID"
    },
    "success": 1
}