On 1/26/06, Michiel van Hulst <michiel(a)vanhulst.nu> wrote:
So could anyone tell me the story of the API ;-)
Of course I may not have all the facts of the matter but this is
basically what happened: On 2005-06-23 Jimbo Wales on behalf of
Wikimedia/Wikipedia announced that an API (most likely SOAP) would be
written to access Wikimedia content. As far as I know the foundation
did not actually follow up on this, somebody obviously has to write it
and they didn't hire anyone to do that (yet?). Perhaps they were
hoping that someone would do it for free upon them announcing it but
that obviously hasn't happened. Long story short lots of talk but not
much of anything else.
I actually started writing a SOAP API that used standard MediaWiki
functions at one point which worked for some limited things like
getting article text but didn't finish it because other things came
up.
There are several issues with implementing a robot API like that, one
is that a lot of our logic is still tied to our current XHTML output
code, which would have to be split off into a backend and presentation
frontends. Another is that it's inherently hard to write some simple
things like getting the first paragraph of an article (or a summary)
because we don't store those things relationally, and UA's having to
implement their own parser for our syntax isn't really practical due
to its complexity.
See the page on meta[1] and bug 208[2]
1.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/KDE_and_Wikipedia
2.
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208