Hi everyone,
I plan to be making a fair number of read access calls to the Wikipedia
API over the next several months and would like to know what the best
practices for efficient, fast access that doesn't hog resources. I've
found that having a single thread that makes a call and waits for a
response before making the next call has been extremely reliable (much
more so
than basically any other web API I've used before). What I'd like to
do make my application multithreaded for reading from the Wikipedia and
make simultaneous calls to the Wikipedia (since the speed of my
application is limited by the rate at which I can read from the Wikipedia.)
I have the following questions:
1) What limits should I observe in terms of number of calls I make per
second and how many calls I should have going simultaneously?
2) How would I know when I'm accessing the API too quickly or too
often? I read at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Errors_and_warnings
that there is ratelimited error message, but so far, I've not seen that
error myself. If I don't get a ratelimited error, does that mean I'm
doing ok with respect to being a good API citizen.
3) Even if I am requiring read access, should I identify myself
explicitly to the API by logging in for the read access -- so that I can
be contacted should there be a problem?
4) Does it make sense to try to obtain bot privileges (even for read
only access)? My understanding is that bots get access to larger
payload in some API calls.
Note: since I'm looking at recent changes to the Wikipedia, downloading
a data dump of the Wikipeida to work on doesn't help me.
Thanks,
-Raymond Yee
(User:RaymondYee)