On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/2008, Bryan Tong Minh bryan.tongminh@gmail.com wrote:
I already started something some time ago on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Machine_readability. It allows you to extract all information provided by the {{Information}} template and some other templates.
Nice. I think they can be merged together?
Nope. Your and my API work from an entirely different viewpoint. My API uses the existing infrastructure of Commons and does not depend on changes in the software. Your API requires updates to the software, which is the most ideal model for the future, but impossible to achieve in a short timespan. Therefore, both should exist separately. My API is something that works right now and provides a somewhat straightforward way to fetch information now, but is not sustainable for the future.
To get to a real working API the first thing we need is to store the meta data as author, license, etc in the database, rather than putting it all together in one text field. You don't want an API that parses text.
Bryan