Submissions/MediaWiki API - A through 茲

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 8013

Title of the submission: MediaWiki API - A through 茲

Type of submission: Workshop

Author of the submission: Yuri Astrakhan

E-mail address: yurikwikimedia.org

Username: Yurik

Country of origin: USA

Affiliation: Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog: Yurik

Abstract

This workshop will focus on MediaWiki API, with the emphasis on how to get data from the wiki. We will discuss all possible access methods - client-side libraries, javascript clients, and internal usage. Other topics, such as internationalization, login, tokens, parsing and editing will be covered as well. The users will be introduced to the help system, the API Sandbox, pywikipediabot and possibly other client frameworks.

Detailed proposal

MediaWiki API has had a very significant growth in the recent years as it addresses the needs of a very wide audience - JavaScript code for AJAXy behaviors, mobile clients for customized experience, external web sites to replicate Wikipedia's data, bots to automate tedious editing tasks, and researchers working on their PhDs and gathering statistics. The API tries to be everything for everyone, and despite showing some signs of aging (which we shall also address in the v2.0 discussion), it is the best way to get to data directly. In this workshop I plan to show the best way to use API in a number of short hands-on excersises, where participants will learn to write short queries to retrieve data. Participants will perform API calls that also explain more advanced API concepts such as multiple queries in one and generators. In addition to the workshop, we will discuss how the API is changing, touch upon the RESTful content API that has been highly demanded but not well defined yet. Lastly, I will solicit participants opinions on the best ways to make the data even more exposed and easy to use, on ways to make Wikipedia and its sister projects's data trully open.

Track: Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 1 hr

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

Add your username here.