Ævar, Brion,
Thanks for your replies,
I think an API would be in everybody's intrests. I don't have looked
at the complete data structure so I couldn't make a prediction how
much effort it would take to code a first verion of an API.
The basis functionality I personaly would like to see in a first sort
like API, it to ask a question/page on subject x and receiving this
article in clean content.
I'm going to look into the data sets and try to get a feeling what
should be done. If this isn't to scary (proberbly is scary) I would
like to contribute some of my time to try and setup or code futher on
the work allready started or at least have a look at it.
It would be great to have this API, but like all other things in live
you need to get you priorities ;-)
Cheers,
Michiel
On Jan 26, 2006, at 9:04 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
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
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On Jan 26, 2006, at 9:06 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
I read in an
article that KDE and the foundation are announcing a
knowledge-intergrated desktop using a webservice API.
This is just great! And the idea of a SOAP/WSDL API is even better.
What is the status or are the plans on this API?
We chatted a bit in August and not much has happened since. A bunch
of other
things that are really annoying but have had more immediate
priority (like
making the servers work regularly ;) keep coming up.
--
M.P.A. (Michiel) van Hulst
e: michiel(a)vanhulst.nu
w:
http://michiel.vanhulst.nu