API:Etiquette/it

This page contains the best practices that should be followed when using the API.

Limiti di richieste
Non c'è un limite fisso sulle richieste in lettura, ma ti chiediamo di essere così gentile da non tentare di interrompere il servizio di un sito. Molti amministratori di sistema si riservano il diritto di bloccarti senza tanti complimenti se metti a repentaglio la stabilità del loro sito.

Making your requests in series rather than in parallel, by waiting for one request to finish before sending a new request, should result in a safe request rate. It is also recommended that you ask for multiple items in one request by:


 * Using the pipe character whenever possible e.g. , instead of making a new request for each title.
 * Using a instead of making a request for each result from another request.


 * Use GZip compression when making API calls by setting  to reduce bandwidth usage.

Requests which make edits, modify state or otherwise are not read-only requests, are subject to rate limiting. The exact rate limit being applied might depend on the type of action, your user rights and the configuration of the website you are making the request to. The limits that apply to you can be determined by accessing the action=query&meta=userinfo&uiprop=ratelimits API endpoint.

When you hit the request rate limit you will receive a with the error code. When you encounter this error, you may retry that request, however you should increase the time between subsequent requests. A common strategy for this is Exponential backoff.

Analizzare le revisioni
Sebbene sia possibile ottenere dei risultati da uno specifico numero di revisione, questa è un'operazione dispensiva per i server. Per ottenere una specifica revisione usa il parametro 'oldid', ad esempio:

Utilizzo del parametro maxlag
Se il tuo compito non richiede interazione (ad esempio se l'utente non attende per il risultato) dovresti utilizzare il parametro maxlag. The value of the  parameter should be an integer number of seconds. Per esempio:

Questo preverrà che il tuo lavoro continui a rimanere in esecuzione mentre il carico sui server è alto. Un valore alto significa un comportamento più aggressivo, un valore basso è più apprezzato.

See for more details.

User-Agent header
It is best practice to set a descriptive User Agent header. To do so, use. For example in PHP:

Non copiare semplicemente l'user-agent di un browser web popolare. Questo fa sì che laddove emerga un problema sia facile tracciare da dove provenga.

If you are calling the API from browser-based JavaScript, you may not be able to influence the  header, depending on the browser. To work around this, use the  header.

Vedi API:Main page/it#Identificare il tuo client e m:User-Agent policy per dettagli.

Data formats
All new API users. Vedi per i dettagli.

Performance
Downloading data in bulk is not always extremely efficient using the Action API. On Wikimedia wikis, there are faster ways to get data in bulk, see m:Research:Data and wikitech:Portal:Data Services for more details.

Other notes
If your requests obtain data that can be cached for a while, you should take steps to cache it, so you don't request the same data over and over again. Some clients may be able to cache data themselves, but for others (particularly JavaScript clients), this is not possible.

Per the HTTP specification, POST requests cannot be cached. Therefore, whenever you're reading data from the web service API, you should use GET requests, not POST.

Also note that a request cannot be served from cache unless the URL is exactly the same. If you make a request for, and cache the result, then a request for   will not go through the cache — even though MediaWiki returns the same data!

You should take care to normalize the URLs you send to the MediaWiki web service, so that slightly different user input won't cause you to waste time on unnecessary HTTP requests. You can normalize a list of page titles by removing duplicates and sorting the titles alphabetically. Similar techniques will work for other kinds of data.

Vedi anche

 * - The quick start guide.