On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
It would also mean that MediaWiki would be making uncontrolled API calls *during the page parse*.
To me it is not clear why a Wikidata web API would be less controlled than a Wikidata Lua API with direct access to the DB.
Oh. Earlier you were talking about general API access.
That would probably not work out too well; I know on my local test wiki it's a pain just having to wait for the ForeignAPIRepo calls for images.
Slow operations will be slow, no matter how you call them. With a web API you at least get to parallelize and distribute the execution, so that you don't have to wait for a sequence of slow operations.
OTOH, with an API in Lua/PHP that accesses the database directly you don't have to worry about establishing a TCP connection, sending headers, waiting for a response, etc.
-- Brad Jorsch Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
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