Hello - I am mainly working with wikipedia's api and am struggling to get accurate data from wikipedia through the mediawiki API. Here is my example:
I am looking for an author by the name of Michael Jackson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_%28writer%29) however when I do an api search for him I get redirected to Michael Jackson the pop star. I know this isn't an easy problem to solve, however if I could specify additional information in the search other than just a title, I could probably get pretty accurate. For example, I know this guys birth year - it would be nice if I could do something like: ?title=michael jackson&birthdate=1942
Is there any way I could do this now? If not, any chance this might get included into the mediawiki api in the future?
Thanks! Andrew
star. I know this isn't an easy problem to solve, however if I could specify additional information in the search other than just a title, I could probably get pretty accurate. For example, I know this guys birth year - it would be nice if I could do something like: ?title=michael jackson&birthdate=1942
Entering this on en.wikipedia.org's search box:
Michael Jackson 1942
gives me the writer as the first hit...
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Andrew Nagy andrew.nagy@villanova.edu wrote:
Is there any way I could do this now? If not, any chance this might get included into the mediawiki api in the future?
No. MediaWiki does not support searching by semantic user data and is unlikely to do so in the near future on Wikimedia installations. You might want to check something with categories though, or a real search using list=search.
Bryan
Bryan Tong Minh schreef:
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Andrew Nagy andrew.nagy@villanova.edu wrote:
Is there any way I could do this now? If not, any chance this might get included into the mediawiki api in the future?
No. MediaWiki does not support searching by semantic user data and is unlikely to do so in the near future on Wikimedia installations. You might want to check something with categories though, or a real search using list=search.
Since you know the page title starts with Michael Jackson, you could also do:
api.php?action=query&list=allpages&apprefix=Michael_Jackson
Which will list all pages whose title starts with "Michael Jackson" (just like [[Special:Prefixindex/Michael_Jackson]] does).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
mediawiki-api@lists.wikimedia.org