We're heavily using the MediaWiki API in our opensource project mwlib
(
http://code.pediapress.com/
), so first of all: Thanks to you all for implementing this
functionality to MediaWiki!
Maybe you're following the discussion initiated by Erik Möller on
Foundation-l about appropriate attribution. As there is yet a consesus
to be found, we plan to include all authors (minus minor edits, minus
bots) after each article in documents (PDFs, ODFs) rendered from
article collections.
Currently we're using an API query with prop=revisions, requesting
rvprop=user|ids|flags. Afterwards we're filtering out minor edits,
anonymous/IP edits and bot edits (via regular expression on username
and comment) and combine edits by the same author. To retrieve the
data for all revisions for heavily edited articles (e.g.
[[en:Physics]]), this requires lots of API requests with rvlimit=500.
Is there a way (or a plan to implement one) to retrieve the list of
unique contributors for a given article (from a given revision down to
the first one)? Ideally this would accept parameters for the mentioned
filtering. I guess inside of MediaWiki code this can be handled very
efficiently (using appropriate database queries) and would eliminate
the need to transfer lots of redundant data over the socket.
-- Johannes Beigel