On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:04 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
There's a fairly straightforward request to add an API/Developer/Developer Hub link to the footer of Wikimedia wikis, near the "Disclaimers", "Mobile view", etc. links: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33464.
This should be fairly trivial to implement, but I wanted to check if there were any objections to such an idea. The basic rationale for including such a link is that other sites such as Twitter and Facebook and Wordnik have similar links. This kind of link encourages viewers to become involved in development for the project (e.g., Wikipedia), as opposed to the MediaWiki logo, which serves a somewhat different purpose/functionality.
Assuming there aren't any objections to the idea, the only remaining question seems to be where to point such a link. Brandon suggested https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Help. I'm wondering if there's an "API basics" FAQ or something similar on mediawiki.org that could be included in whatever landing page is chosen. Something that includes common questions about the API such as "What formats are available?", "Do I need an API key?" (which I think is a pretty major question to answer, given how many other APIs I've come across work), "How can I get started developing for Wikimedia wikis?", etc. Does anyone know if such a page exists already?
I am not aware of such pages, but think a developers page should also have something about dumps and they might also be interested to know they can customize Wikipedia with user css, JavaScript, gadgets, etc. Information about the API is good too and maybe reporting a bug. :)
Cheers, Katie
MZMcBride
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