On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
I agree, but whenever I'm going to do this, I am going to make a generic interface for sites that can output metadata in a structured way. This means that Flickr, Picassa and others can be easily supported, but that MediaWiki will only be supported when the aforementioned metadata is supported by MediaWiki. I believe that eventually MediaWiki will support such features, but we will by then be well into the 1.20s.
That's a very acceptable compromise (and yes, it will probably be 1.20s and 2020s...)
There is a possibility for an intermediate hack, which would keep your extension clean from the parsing madness and still beat the official API solution. A while back, Brianna suggested to me to write an API that is compatible to Flickr but uses Commons instead; the idea being that all tools which can talk to Flickr could then instantly talk to Commons as well, just by changing the base API URL. I started this [1], but then abandoned it (probably under an avalanche of other urgent stuff).
While this would still be a good idea, a similar API (flickr-compatible or not) could be set up for non-Commons (WikiMedia, possibly other) projects on the toolserver rather quickly (compared to the official MediaWiki-blessed way); your extension could then just ask the toolserver API for the structured data.
Cheers, Magnus