[Mediawiki-api] MediaWiki API and Chinese language variants

[Jan Hecking]

To follow up on this somewhat old thread: I finally got around to 
actually testing Paolo's suggestion of using the index.php API instead 
of api.php. Turns out it doesn't actually work. While the index.php API 
does have a variant parameter that allows to select one of the Chinese 
language variants (e.g. zh, zh-hk, zh-tw) it does not actually honor 
this parameter when combined with action=raw. When returning the raw 
Wiki markup it always returns the same variant (zh?) no matter what 
variant is specified.

$ curl -s 
"http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%A5%BF%E6%81%A9%E5%A1%94&action=raw&variant=zh-cn" 
 > zh-cn
$ curl -s 
"http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%A5%BF%E6%81%A9%E5%A1%94&action=raw&variant=zh-tw" 
 > zh-tw
$ diff zh-cn zh-tw

diff shows that the markup returned is identical. With action=view (the 
default) the output is clearly different.

So it looks like there is actually no way to get the raw markup in 
different language variants?

Thanks,
Jan


On 12/13/2007 6:45 PM, Jan Hecking wrote:
> On 12/13/2007 11:28 PM, Paolo Liberatore wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Jan Hecking wrote:
>>
>>   
>>     
>>> On 12/13/2007 1:04 AM, Roan Kattouw wrote:
>>>     
>>>       
>>>> Jan Hecking schreef:
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Is it possible to retrieve content in different Chinese language
>>>>> variants using the /w/api.php API? There doesn't seem to be a variant or
>>>>> language parameter that would allow selecting a variant like "zh-tw" or
>>>>> "zh-hk". Is there some other way to do this?
>>>>>
>>>>>         
>>>>>           
>>>> How is this done in the regular user interface, then?
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> I would like to know that as well. :)
>>>
>>> My suspicion is that the user interface, i.e. the frontend servers, do
>>> the conversion. Which would mean that all users of the MediaWiki API
>>> would have to replicate that work. That would severely limit the use of
>>> the API for Chinese language content IMHO. But then I don't know much
>>> about MediaWiki yet and maybe I have just missed something obvious.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jan
>>>
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
>> There is a "variant" parameter in
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Parameters_to_index.php
>> I believe it's only used for Chinese.
>>   
>>     
>
> Thanks for the reminder, Paolo! I hadn't considered index.php before
> because I assumed it only returns the rendered HTML markup. But now I
> saw that there is an action=raw parameter which returns the raw wiki
> markup that I'm looking for. However this API has one other drawback: In
> contrast to api.php it doesn't have an option to resolve redirects
> automatically. When calling api.php I was using the redirects parameter
> to do so but this doesn't seem to be supported by index.php when using
> action=raw (only for action=view). That means I would potentially have
> to make multiple calls to resolve redirects manually. Or is there a way
> to avoid this?
>
> Thanks,
> Jan
>