2009/1/30 Johannes Beigel <johannes.beigel(a)pediapress.com>om>:
On 29.01.2009, at 13:48, Brianna Laugher wrote:
On Wikimedia Commons a little bit of work has
been done to this end:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commons_API>
We've been aware of this page and Magnus' implementation, and we think
it looks really good!
The information is (AFAIK) scraped from the rendered XHTML of
articles. This could be done in a less error-prone way (and more
efficiently) if the data would be stored and accessed via database in
some way. Of course this would require some discussion, formal
decisions and code changes. But as I stated in an earlier post: I
think MediaWiki is so widely used by people who want to share and
collaborate on free content, that it's not too farfetched to build
some "license infrastracture" into the software itself.
I agree that it makes a lot of sense. But because it would be a big
change, I fear that unless the lead developers show great enthusiasm
for the idea, it will take a very long time to be accepted and
completed. Whereas building an "add-on" tool can be faster to get to
point of functionality.
It may be a good idea to try and build the Commons API to mimic the
MediaWiki API, imagining that in the future such information will be
available via that. So then hopefully for now people could use the
Commons API, and in the future switch to the MediaWiki API by just
changing the API URL, and all their queries could stay the same.
How does that sound? Other ideas about how to approach it are welcome...
cheers
Brianna
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
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