On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 12:39 AM, Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com wrote:
As you know, wikisource needs robust, well-defined data, and there's a strict, deep relationship between wikisource and Commons since Commons hosts images of books, in .djvu or .pdf files. Commons shares both images and contents fo information page of images, so that any wiki project can visualize a view-only "pseudo-page" accessing to a local page named as the file name into Commons.
Working into self-made data semantization into it.wikisouce using a lot of creative tricks, we discovered that it's hard/almost impossible to read by AJAX calls the contents of pages of other projects since well-known same origin policy, but that File: local pages are considered as coming from "same origin" so that they can be read as any other local page, and this AJAX call asking for the content of i.e. File:Die_Judenfrage_in_Deutchland_1936.djvu:
html=$.ajax({url:" http://wikisource.org/wiki/File:Die_Judenfrage_in_Deutchland_1936.djvu ",async:false}).responseText;
gives back the html text of local File: view-only page, and this means that any data stored into information page into Commons is freely accessible by a javascript script and can easily used locally. In particular, data stored into information and/or (much better) Book and Creator templates can be retrieved and parsed
Has this been described/used before? It seems a plain, simple way to share and disseminate good, consistent metadata into any project; and this runs from today, without any change on current wiki software. [..]
You can also do this more directly using JSON with callback - Define a function foo, and put http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Main_Page&f... as the src of the script tag. This works for certain "safe" api methods. In future we may support CORS which will allow full cross-origin js requests between Wikimedia sites
However, I think the main issue is that people want to do more things with metadata than just retrieving the information with js. I suppose it all boils down to use-cases. I'll admit I'm not overly familiar with Wikisource's metadata use case.
-- -bawolff