API:Tutorial



This page contains some unpolished quick notes used to present Roan Kattouw's 2012 workshop on the MediaWiki action API. This page is not a complete tutorial on the MediaWiki action API by any means and needs rework. It provides a quick introduction to the API, useful recipes for common GET requests, and a list of available resources with more information.

=Tutorial for MediaWiki's RESTful web service API=

Why should you use the action API? Bots, AJAX, Gadgets, other things.

Roan says: generally any Ajax feature is going to use the api.php entry point. But right now the easiest thing to do is to write a bot or to use the API clients.

Definitions

 * REST API for MediaWiki
 * exposes things MediaWiki has in the database or otherwise understands
 * does not include semantic stuff like "definition of a word in Wiktionary" or even "lead paragraph of an article"
 * usage: send HTTP requests (GET or POST) to the  URL, receive XML or JSON or other formats.  You'll usually want JSON or XML.
 * JSON and XML and Representational state transfer (RESTful)

There are other things that also get casually called the MediaWiki API, like the internal interfaces that extensions and special pages can hook into. We're not talking about that right now, just the action API.


 * (possibly talk about how it works from the back end, if people ask)...

How to use it
Follow along by using w:en:Special:ApiSandbox – you will mostly use the query Action.
 * Entry point: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php (see API:Main page)
 * or any other wiki
 * Talk about versioning and how non-WMF wikis might have different version of MediaWiki and thus the API
 * https works too!
 * Parameters are passed in query string. Not passing any will give you the help page with the autogenerated documentation.


 * is used for most read actions, separate action= modules exist for write actions
 * takes one or more titles for the query to operate on
 * lists the images on a page; lots of other stuff in prop=, list=, meta=
 * sets the max # of results. Default is 10, 'max' works
 * popular values for format= : xml, json, xmlfm (default), jsonfm
 * If you want to find sections from the table of contents, use  using the   property; you can use   for the wikitext that comes before the first section header.


 * State-changing actions (e.g. editing)
 * POST requests only
 * two-step process involving token
 * details of individual actions are complex, read the docs
 * example: ?action=query&titles=Foo&prop=info&intoken=edit for obtaining edit token, then POST to

If you want to make a lot of API calls, and perhaps run very busy and active bots et al., please talk to the admins of that wiki ahead of time so they do not block you. Also run your requests in serial, not parallel. ''resource for contacting them to go here. TODO''
 * There are limits in the software on how many edits per second you can make.


 * Example nouns to look up:
 * Kanichar
 * Kolar_Gold_Fields
 * Cooperative_principle
 * MS_Riverdance

Magic recipes
Nonobvious and very useful (these may be outdated - 12/2014)
 * Things you'll definitely need:
 * for basic page info
 * for page history
 * for page wikitext
 * for page HTML
 * Doing crazy stuff
 * multiple titles with  (This will make multiple calls count as one for the purpose of rate limiting)
 * This works for pages but not revisions. Read the documentation via the Sandbox or via   autodocs.
 * multiple modules with
 * generators (kind of like UNIX pipes) with

Resources

 * REST API for Dummies: The Store Metaphor
 * Getting help
 * Autogenerated documentation:  with no parameters such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php, or equivalently visit Special:ApiHelp
 * Documentation on mediawiki.org: API:Main page (details about specific modules/parameters is often outdated, autogenerated docs are authoritative)
 * The API Sandbox -- example w:en:Special:ApiSandbox
 * mediawiki-api -- mediawiki-api@lists.wikimedia.org
 * mediawiki-api-announce@lists.wikimedia.org - PLEASE subscribe because we tell you about breaking changes, which happen a few times every year. mediawiki-api-announce
 * IRC channel
 * me! (Roan Kattouw)

You may actually want

 * The dumps of all of Wikipedia so you can work with them locally - http://dumps.wikimedia.org/
 * Offline Wikipedia readers such as Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org