Brianna Laugher schrieb: Guys, before re-inventing several wheels, please look at what we already have. Please have a look at <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Tag_categories>, which defines a way to make license tags machine readable. Using that scheme, it would be easy to build a script on the toolserver that delivers metadata in a machine readable form. No need for screen scraping. Also, please consider <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RDF> which provides a way for mediawiki to serve machine readable metadata about anything and everything. It would be easy to integrate it into license tags. It has been around for years, all it needs is a little push from the community and some code review. -- daniel

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:55 AM, Brianna Laugher &lt;brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There is a big conceptual difference between the two APIs, IMHO. The MediaWiki API can be used to query technically defined things: Link lists, categories, template usage and so on. A Commons API (mine or someone elses) parses the content itself for data and relations that are not technically defined. One way would be to add some kind of license metadata per page into the database. This is possible, but rather specific; also, it would likely mean to create a separate interface just for that. The better way (IMHO) is to store all used "page:template:parameter:value" tuples in a wiki in a separate database table, which could be queried by the MediaWiki API. This has been suggested time and again by me and others. It would then be much easier for a third-party API to get the relevant data for a page. The functionality is part of Semantic Wikimedia, but would actually scale as a project on its own ;-) This approach would also aloow for the integration of tools like TemplateTiger [1] directly into Wikipedia. Magnus [1] http://toolserver.org/~kolossos/templatetiger/tt-table4.php?template=Person…