Hi,
Apologies for this dupe of a wiki discussion page, but this appears to be where all the action is.
It's fantastic news that the WikiMedia Foundation has been accepted as a mentor for Google Summer of Code 2006! The suggestion of writing a programmable REST/XML-RPC/SOAP API that exposes MediaWiki domain objects is really quite exciting and I plan to apply with this project in mind.
Do you think that this project suggestion is likely to make the final cut? I'm starting to really set my heart on the idea but I don't want to spend too much time thinking about it if it's unlikely to be used. I'm not entirely clear on how the applicaiton process works (even after reading the Google FAQ).
I commented on the wiki discussion page that there appears to be a third party API run by Ontok (http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia) - I assume they have no direct affliation with the WikiMedia Foundation? Will there be any need to contact those people?
Also, someone has linked to the alpha version of a query interface that directly accesses the wiki database (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php), but like "IndyGreg" on the discussion page I don't think this constitutes an API in the same sense described here, would you agree? Perhaps eventually this code could be integrated into the same extension.
It would be great to work with the pywikipediabot, perlmediawikiclient, and java mediawikiclient guys to create something that they could all use too, and the possibilities for the use of this API are endless!
Best Wishes
Ben
-- Ben "tola" Francis http://hippygeek.co.uk