To follow up on this somewhat old thread: I finally
got around to
actually testing Paolo's suggestion of using the index.php API instead
of api.php. Turns out it doesn't actually work. While the index.php API
does have a variant parameter that allows to select one of the Chinese
language variants (e.g. zh, zh-hk, zh-tw) it does not actually honor
this parameter when combined with action=raw. When returning the raw
Wiki markup it always returns the same variant (zh?) no matter what
variant is specified.
$ curl -s
"http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%A5%BF%E6%81%A9%E5%A1%94&action=raw&variant=zh-cn"
zh-cn
$ curl -s
"http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%A5%BF%E6%81%A9%E5%A1%94&action=raw&variant=zh-tw"
zh-tw
$ diff zh-cn zh-tw
diff shows that the markup returned is identical. With action=view (the
default) the output is clearly different.
So it looks like there is actually no way to get the raw markup in
different language variants?
Thanks,
Jan
I think it's due there's only one raw markup. The variant is chosen
later for display. So you should locally perform that work (you'll need
some Mediawiki: messages).