Hi All,
Following up from the blog post about how crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/ and the sessions we had in the Wikimedia Hackathon – Responsible Use of Infrastructure https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392904 (slides https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Responsible_Use_of_Infrastructure.pdf) and the Future of MediaWiki APIs https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392077 (slides https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Hackathon_2025_-_Future_of_Wikimedia_APIs.pdf), I wanted to share a blog post that Halley Coplin (our product manager for the APIs) just published:
https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2025/06/12/apis-as-a-product-investing-in-the...
The blog post summarizes many of the points discussed at the Hackathon and touches on the conversations we’ve had with the API listening tour https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.5:_API_Listening_Tour_Summary earlier this year. Many thanks to Halley https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:HCoplin-WMF for all her work on this, and to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts, ideas and pain point stories at the listening tour and at the Hackathon <3
If you have additional input on the APIs, feel welcome to use the talk page https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Artifacts/KR_5.5:_API_Listening_Tour_Summary&action=edit&redlink=1 of the listening tour summary to comment & get in touch!
Birgit
P.S. More links: Giuseppe presented https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcdNweh8oA about the impact of crawlers at the recent MediaWiki users and developers conference, including also a few tips for operators of smaller websites on how they could deal with the scraper problem on their own sites.