Hello all.
I would like to suggest a few features that would mal life easier for
people who develop bots and other tools that access the wikipedia and
also reduce traffic from such tools. I belive those to be fairly easy to
implement.
In case some of the features already exist, I aplogize - I didn't find
any information about it (to be honstest, I don't even know where to
look in the first place).
The idea is to have an optionaly URL-Parameter like "format=", that
would tell the software to return a page in a format different from the
full-fledged HTML. I would like to suggest formats for "real" pages and
special pages separately, as the requirements are different.
For articles, discussion-pages, etc, support the following formats:
* source - return the wiki-source of that page
* text - return a plain text version, with all markup striped/replaced
(tables, text boxes, etc do not have to be formatd nicely, but their
content should be returned)
For special pages and all automatically generated lists (kategories,
changes, watchlist, whatlinkshere, etc):
* csv - return the list in CSV-format
* rss - return entries in the list as RSS items.
Additionally, for the normal "full html" view, provide a switch "plain"
that supresses all sidebars, etc and shows just the formated text.
As to the implementation, I would suggest to map the format-name to the
name of a php-class and load it on demand. That way, now formats can be
supported by just placing an appropriate file in the php lib-path.
Shall I submit a feature request to the wikizilla regarding this? What
do you think?
Thank you for your attention,
Daniel