API:Showing interesting content

Showing interesting pages
You can query a curated selection of quality content using the FeaturedFeeds extension, which provides daily feeds of quality wiki content in RSS or Atom format. (This is contrast to the Recent changes stream, which on an active wiki is a firehose of non-stop changes.

How it works on Wikimedia wikis
mw:Extension:FeaturedFeeds/WMF deployment describes the feed names available on WMF wikis, including:
 * Today's Featured Article on most wikipedias
 * Did you know... on many wikis XXX why an error on English wikipedia?
 * On this day on many wikis
 * Quote of the day on wikiquote
 * Media of the Day on commons

Editors on each wiki select this content and often present it on the main page of the wiki, for example English Wikiquote, and other pages. They organize and name this featured content differently on each wiki. Using the featuredfeed API module you can retrieve an organized feed of the information. Simply make a request to the wiki that has a featured feed you like, giving it as the  parameter.

Example:

Note the featuredfeed API module ignores the  parameter if the API request succeeds. You should still specify  so you can check for errors such as , but if the request succeeds you always get XML back, either in RSS or Atom format. You can simply display this as is in most web browsers, or you can parse it. There are RSS parsing libraries available for most languages. You will probably parse the feed to show the most recent item in it.

Caution
Before offering this feature in a language, you should check to see if that language's wiki implements the feed.

Clients of featuredfeeds
The Wikipedia channel for IFTTT] provides "if this, then that" recipes from this such as The recipes use triggers such as "Word of the day". These run on a web service written in Python using Flask. The triggers query the corresponding featuredfeed as described above, using the feedparser Python library. For performance the server caches the information from the feed.
 * Send yourself a weekly vocabulary list of Wikipedia words of the day
 * Set your Android wallpaper to the Wikipedia picture of the day

Next steps
Try the various feeds, use their content however you wish.

The editors who curate these featured articles would love to know how you're using them, let them know on the talk page of the feature.