For your interest, consideration and API-geeking. Presumably will involve reading template parameters.

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com Date: 30 Mar 2008 15:10 Subject: [Commons-l] Commons API To: commons-l commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hi,

There is an interesting Firefox extension called Zemanta, that works with some blogging platforms, to suggest images to match a blog post you type. One of the sources they use is Commons. See this post (comments) for a description of how it works and what it's lacking: http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/97/zemanta-wikimedia-commons-for-bloggers

In particular, "If you have an idea how to correctly capture wikipedia images attribution (something that would assure at least 50% correct coverage from 2.8M images), please help us! ;)"

Really, we can't blame people too much for not providing attribution, when we don't give that information in a standard way, or give a standard way of accessing it.

Now is as good a time as any to formally write an API to recommend for other people to use. Aside from the MediaWiki API, there are three main things I can think of that are often needed to be automated: * identify any "problem tags" (files with deletion markers shouldn't be used or indexed by third parties) * extract license name(s) and URL for a given file * extract author attribution string for a given file

So I propose we put our heads together and figure out the most robust algorithm for each of these, and provide some sample code for each.

I made a start here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:API

Contributions and feedback welcome...

cheers, Brianna

-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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