Hi Gabriel,

Oh yeah, I see now that the REST api doesn't mind parallel requests. I was going off of the etiquette section in the documentation for the other api (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Etiquette). That one prefers requests in series.

Ah, ok - that caveat is actually quite relevant for my project. It requires all revisions of certain pages along with all revisions of their talk pages (along with a bunch of other stuff). So perhaps the REST api is not for me. I am not targeting especially frequently edited articles specifically; rather, I'm look at articles related to particular real-world conflicts (international and civil wars). I am a postdoc at Copenhagen University funded by the Danish government (grant information at the bottom of this page: http://ufm.dk/en/research-and-innovation/funding-programmes-for-research-and-innovation/who-has-received-funding/2015/postdoc-grants-from-the-danish-council-for-independent-research-social-sciences-february-2015?set_language=en&cl=en). Let me know if you want more identification or anything.

I actually have another question about the REST api, if that's ok. I'm using it to get page views over time for the pages that I'm interested in. However, the data don't seem to stretch very far back in time - is that correct? And if so, is there a better way of getting page views (short of using the raw files at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/)?

Thanks for your help so far!

Bertel




2017-01-03 19:25 GMT+01:00 Gabriel Wicke <gwicke@wikimedia.org>:
Bertel,

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 7:40 AM, Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen <geilfeldt@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Gabriel,

The REST API looks promising - thank you!

Having played around with it a bit, I seem to only be able to get one revision per request. Is that correct, or am I doing something wrong?


this is correct. The requests themselves are quite cheap, and can be parallelized up to rate limit set out in the API documentation.

 
My project requires every revision and its references from a large number of articles, so that would make a lot of requests. The regular API allows for multiple revisions per request (only with action=query, though).


There is a caveat here in that we currently don't store all revisions for all articles. This means that requests for really old revisions will trigger a more expensive on-demand parse, just as with the action API. Can you say more about the number of articles you are targeting, and how this list is selected? Regarding the selection, I am mainly wondering if you are targeting especially frequently edited articles.

Thanks,

Gabriel
 

Thanks!

Bertel







2016-12-21 17:01 GMT+01:00 Gabriel Wicke <gwicke@wikimedia.org>:
Bertel, another option is to use the REST API:

Hope this helps,

Gabriel

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 3:20 AM, Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen <geilfeldt@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Brad and Gergo,

Thanks for your responses!

@Brad: Yeah, that was also my impression, but I wasn't sure. Seemed strange that the example in the official docs would point to a place where the feature was disabled. Thank you for clearing that up!

@Gergo: I've been looking at action=parse, but as far as I understand it, it is limited to one revision per API request, which makes it quite slow to get a bunch of older revisions from a large number of articles. action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content omits the references from the output (just gives the string "{{reflist}}" after "References"). "mvrefs" sounds very promising, though! I will definitely check that out - thank you!

Best,

Bertel

2016-12-20 19:51 GMT+01:00 Gergo Tisza <gtisza@wikimedia.org>:
On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen <geilfeldt@gmail.com> wrote:
And is there no way of getting references through the API? 

There is no nice way, but you can always get the HTML (or the parse tree, depending on whether you want parsed or raw refs) and process it; references are not hard to extract. For the wikitext version, there is a python tool: https://github.com/mediawiki-utilities/python-mwrefs

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