

Now Wikipedia has an API - ptm
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

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simonw
This isn't new - it's probably Wikipedia's best kept secret though. It first
got saved to del.icio.us in November 2006:
<http://del.icio.us/url/08d335d4c1d2f491cc70e1bf61e5d880>

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bbb
What format do they use? It looks like neither SOAP nor XML-RPC. It looks more
like some home-brew XML-dialect.

Are they reinventing the wheel, and if so, why?

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jrockway
They're PHP programmers. It's a well kept secret, but PHP actually stands for
"reinvent the wheel thousands of times because I don't know any better".

But hey, at least they don't have to install CPAN modules! That's hard!
</sarcasm>

~~~
anewaccountname
It is somewhat ironic that you said that seeing as CPAN is a whole collection
of wheel reinventions...

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tlrobinson
You can also get the MySQL dumps (and have been able to for awhile):

<http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download>

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fish
Wikipedia bots (ex. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot>) have been
using this for a while (at least a year).

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peterpoe
It's still a work in progress I think. It was hard to find for me too, when I
built <http://www.wikirandom.org>

