Wouldn’t it fit better in a RESTful architecture to use hypermedia for distinguishing between verbosity levels? Rather than adding ?verbose=yes to the URL, you could use the header Accept: vnd.example-com.foo+json; verbosity=1 or Accept: vnd.example-com.foo+json; verbosity=0 for brevity.

Sorry for necroing, I thought it’d contribute to the post. :)