Hi Nemo,
As Gabriel notes, the Wiktionary endpoint is still very much experimental, and is subject to change. One of the ongoing goals for the Android app is to integrate more rich content into the browsing experience. One such feature is to allow the user to highlight words in an article and see a quick popup definition of the word from Wiktionary[1]. To facilitate this action, we set up a RESTBase endpoint for fetching the desired term from Wiktionary[2].
This feature is currently only available in the Wikipedia Beta app, and is restricted only to English wiktionary. Further work on this endpoint will depend on the level of user engagement with the feature, once it's rolled out to the main Wikipedia app. So, once again, even though we're building the endpoint with the hope that it would be used by other consumers besides the Android app (and expanded to all languages), at the moment it's by no means ready for general consumption.
We do have a wiki page[3] with some more details on the service endpoints that are used by the apps, which you, as well as the Wiktionary community, are welcome to comment on.
-Dmitry
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115484 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119235 [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/RESTBase_services_for_app...
On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 12:18 PM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
Federico,
as indicated by the classification as "experimental" [1], the definition end point [2] is at a very early point of its development. The mobile app team has added preliminary support for extracting definitions in the content service [3] using Parsoid's template metadata, and is using this end point to power a "define this word" feature in the next version of the Android app. You can preview the feature in the beta Android app when browsing English Wikipedia by selecting a word, and then hitting the 'definition' icon next to 'copy'.
In this first iteration, only English Wiktionary is supported. Generalizing the service and API end point to provide definitions using more or all Wiktionaries will require more work and planning. In the next iteration, I would expect a focus on enabling collaborative definition and maintenance of extraction rules, as well as broader involvement of Wiktionary communities in the planning process. The timing for the next iteration depends partly on the mobile app team's priorities, so I will defer to the team to comment on this.
To summarize: We are aiming to gradually develop this into a generally useful, stable and well-documented API entry point for word definitions. The experimental end point published right now is just the beginning, and you are very much invited to help shape the way forward.
Gabriel
-- Gabriel Wicke Principal Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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