Hello everyone,

We are working on making it easier to access Wikidata’s data programmatically so that more people can build great applications on top of our data. As part of this we are building a new REST API for Wikibase. A while ago we asked for feedback on the draft specification for that new API (see previous communication). It is in development now. While it is not in the state which we would like to run on Wikidata, you can now have a look at the current development state on Beta Wikidata and follow along as we build out the API. You can find the current state of the specification we are working from at https://doc.wikimedia.org/Wikibase/master/js/rest-api/. (Small caveat: The specification might sometimes be slightly ahead of the code development and contain functionality that still needs to be implemented.)

Please note that the API is still in the experimental development state. There might be changes in the functionality available and API’s behavior that we will not announce separately.

The current state can already do the following:

• Retrieve the data of an Item with ‘GET /entities/items/{item_id}’ and filter what fields (i.e. type, labels, descriptions, aliases, statements, sitelinks) are returned when reading the Item data

• Retrieve all statements of an Item with ‘GET /entities/items/{item_id}/statements’

• Retrieve the data of a single statement of an Item with ‘GET /entities/items/{item_id}/statements/{statement_id}’ or ‘GET /statements/{statement_id}’

• Conditionally request the data only if it has changed since the specified revision/timestamp (using If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since HTTP headers)

• Create a statement on an Item with ‘POST /entities/items/{item_id}/statements’

• Authenticate and authorize as a Beta Wikidata user when making edits using the API, as well as provide edit tags and edit comment, and mark an edit as one made by a bot.

If you want to give it a try, here are some REST API calls for an example Item (“house cat”) on Beta Wikidata:

• Get the complete data of the Item: GET https://wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org/w/rest.php/wikibase/v0/entities/items/Q598520

• Get all labels: GET https://wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org/w/rest.php/wikibase/v0/entities/items/Q598520?_fields=labels

• Get a specific statement by its ID: GET https://wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org/w/rest.php/wikibase/v0/entities/items/Q598520/statements/Q598520$f004ec2b-4857-3b69-b370-e8124f5bd3ac

• Get all statements: GET https://wikidata.beta.wmflabs.org/w/rest.php/wikibase/v0/entities/items/Q598520/statements

The following things are still missing before it can go live on Wikidata in a first version:

• Replacing the statement on an Item with ‘PUT /entities/items/{item_id}/statements/{statement_id}’ or ‘PUT /statements/{statement_id}’

• Editing a statement on an Item with ‘PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/statements/{statement_id}’ or ‘PATCH /statements/{statement_id}’

• Removing the statement from an Item with ‘DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/statements/{statement_id}’ or ‘DELETE /statements/{statement_id}’

• Automated edit summaries

The following will likely not be available in the first version but follow later:

• Creating or deleting an Item

• Getting a statement from an Item based on the Property ID in the statement

• Any operation (reading, adding, editing, removing) on sitelinks, labels, descriptions and aliases

• Any operation on entity types other than Items (i.e. Properties, Lexemes, …)

• Translated error messages

If you have any feedback on what’s there so far please let us know at Wikidata talk:REST API feedback round.

Cheers,