API:Tutorial
Contents |
[edit] Tutorial for MediaWiki's RESTful web service API
Why should you use the web API? Bots, AJAX, Gadgets, other things.
Roan says: generally any Ajax feature is going to use the api.php entry point. But right now the easiest thing to do is to write a bot or to use the API clients.
[edit] Definitions
- REST API for MediaWiki
- exposes things MediaWiki has in the database or otherwise understands
- does not include semantic stuff like "definition of a word in Wiktionary" or even "lead paragraph of an article"
- usage: send HTTP requests (GET or POST) to the
api.php
URL, receive XML or JSON or other formats. You'll usually want JSON or XML.- w:en:JSON and w:en:XML and w:en:Representational state transfer (RESTful)
There are other things that also get casually called the MediaWiki API, like the internal interfaces that extensions and special pages can hook into. We're not talking about that right now, just the web API.
-
- (possibly talk about how it works from the back end, if people ask)...
[edit] How to use it
- Entry point: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php (see API:Main page#The endpoint)
- or any other wiki
- Talk about versioning and how non-WMF wikis might have different version of MediaWiki and thus the API
- https works too!
- or any other wiki
- Parameters are passed in query string. Not passing any will give you the help page with the autogenerated documentation.
Follow along by using w:en:Special:ApiSandbox -- query is what you will usually want.
- Example query: ?action=query&titles=San_Francisco&prop=images&imlimit=20&format=jsonfm
action=query
is used for most read actions, separate action= modules exist for write actionstitles=
takes one or more titles for the query to operate onprop=images
lists the images on a page; lots of other stuff in prop=, list=, meta=limit=
sets the max # of results. Default is 10, 'max' works- popular values for format= : xml, json, xmlfm (default), jsonfm
- If you want to find sections from the table of contents, use
section=
using theindex
property, and you can call 0 for the wikitext that comes before the first section header.
- State-changing actions (e.g. editing)
- POST requests only
- two-step process involving token
- details of individual actions are complex, read the docs
- example: ?action=query&titles=Foo&prop=info&intoken=edit for obtaining edit token, then POST to
?action=edit&title=Foo&...
If you want to make a lot of API calls, and perhaps run very busy and active bots et al., please talk to the admins of that wiki ahead of time so they do not block you. Also run your requests in serial, not parallel. resource for contacting them to go here. TODO
- There are limits in the software on how many edits per second you can make.
- Example nouns to look up:
-
- Kanichar
- Kolar_Gold_Fields
- Cooperative_principle
- MS_Riverdance
[edit] Magic recipes
Nonobvious and very useful.
- Things you'll definitely need:
prop=info
for basic page infoprop=revisions
for page historyprop=revisions&rvprop=content
for page wikitextaction=parse
for page HTML
- Doing crazy stuff
- multiple titles with
titles=Foo|Bar|Baz
(This will make multiple calls count as one for the purpose of rate limiting)- This works for pages but not revisions. Read the documentation via the Sandbox or via
api.php
autodocs.
- This works for pages but not revisions. Read the documentation via the Sandbox or via
- multiple modules with
&prop=images|templates&list=allpages|blocks
- generators (kind of like UNIX pipes) with
&titles=Foo&generator=links&prop=revisions
- multiple titles with
[edit] Roan talks about jQuery & AJAX
-
- TODO: add sample code from Roan
[edit] Resources
- Getting help
- Autogenerated documentation:
api.php
with no parameters such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php - Documentation on mediawiki.org: API:Main page (details about specific modules/parameters often outdated, autogenerated docs are authoritative)
- The API Sandbox -- example w:en:Special:ApiSandbox
- mail:mediawiki-api -- [email protected]
- [email protected] - PLEASE subscribe because we tell you about breaking changes, which happen a few times every year. mail:mediawiki-api-announce
- #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net
- me! (Roan Kattouw)
- Autogenerated documentation:
[edit] You may actually want
- The dumps of all of Wikipedia so you can work with them locally - http://dumps.wikimedia.org/
- Offline Wikipedia readers such as Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org