It is official: The Wikimedia REST API https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/REST_API, your scalable and fresh source of Wikimedia content and data in machine-readable formats, is now ready for full production use. The 1.0 release means that you can now fully rely on the stability guarantees set out in the API versioning policy https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_versioning. Read more about the stability levels, use cases, as well as technical background on how the REST API integrates with our caching layers in our blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/wikimedia-rest-api/
We are looking forward to your feedback at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:REST_API, or here on-list.
This release was made possible by the hard work of many. First of all, the Services team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Services (Marko Obrovac, Petr Pchelko and Eric Evans), created the general API proxy and storage functionality, and curated the API documentation https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/. The actual end points are co-designed with, and largely backed, by services developed by the following WMF teams: Editing (Parsing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing and citoid https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Citoid), Reading https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading (Infrastructure https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Reading_Infrastructure_team and Web https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web), and Analytics https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics. Volunteer Moritz Schubotz and the MathJax https://www.mathjax.org/ community contributed the math end points, and the PDF end point is powered by the open source electron-render-service https://github.com/msokk/electron-render-service project. Finally, the WMF techops team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Operations runs the excellent caching infrastructure that makes this API scale so well, and have helped with many aspects from hardware procurement to firewalling.
Thank you all for your hard work!
We are looking forward to continuing to work with you all on making this API an even better platform for building user experiences, services, and tools.
Cheers,
Gabriel and the Services team