Hi
I added a comment to Bug 1012 and I thought I'd explain it here little bit
more. The problem:
When requesting category one will get the raw Wiki-text as a response which
will be like this in the case of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geography_by_country?action=raw (or
edit):
[[Category:Geography|*Country, Grouped by]]
[[Category:Categories by country]]
{{catAZ}}
... some few lines more...
But what an API or a crawler would expect in this case is the fully
evaluated Wiki-text (or XML). This will be the same content of the HTML
result page but with no style and as a - potentially large - contiguous list
of countries (in Wiki-text or XML again).
I now have looked again what has been proposed until today and I found "Bug
208: API for external access" some requests at Wikitech-l like a
"Minimalistic Web-API for use by Tools nad Bots".
All alternative solutions proposed so far, like the Phyton Framework (being
a HTML screen scraper) or Perl (reading SQL-Dump) do not solve our problem.
So I really want to begin to play around with the Wikimedia-PHP code.
Any comments or help?
Stefan