Thanks for all your responses!
John’s amendment seems like a really good one. If I understand correctly, this will be the same as the original proposal for users of mdn/data, but changes the contribution side to keep the Wiki workflow, populating mdn/data from the Wiki using $json.summary.
The big advantage of this is that we keep the familiar workflow. I agree that editing JSON properties is a terrible workflow for prose content, and we will need to think more about that side if we want to move away from the Wiki as a contribution path.
This approach also resolves the localization issue for MDN itself, although not for anyone using the mdn/data copy.
I think the “build step” where we take $json.summary and add it to mdn/data offers value in giving us a way to validate the summary.
So to accomplish this, there seem to be about three pieces of work:
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on the content side, make sure that the content returned by “$json.summary” is in good shape.
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check that the way “$json.summary” is calculated is what we actually want. There is some documentation here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/Contribute/Tools/Document_parameters, but from that it’s not clear to me how “$json.summary” is calculated. Note also that there’s some confusion about how to mark summaries.
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add the “short_description” (or “summary”, maybe) property to the mdn/data schema, and write a script that can generate a PR to update it. I guess we would run the script whenever we need to make a new mdn/data release.