Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Miscellaneous/Wikipedia API: Output also in text or in TSV format
Wikipedia API: Output also in text or in TSV format
- Problem: The output of the API is not in a simple format like plain text, but in JSON or HTML, where it is e.g. appropriate or requested (user request or according to API usage statistics).
- Proposed solution: For example, enable this output, but via an API:
# List of revisions for user Dušan Kreheľ? curl -s 'https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Du%C5%A1an_Krehe%C4%BE&offset=&limit=500&action=history'|tr '"' "\n"|grep "oldid="|grep -v ";diff"|tr "=" " "|awk '{print $3}'|sort 21442049 21474908 21618555 21696280 22094013 22159891 22232863 22444821 22462733 23450518 23462853
- Who would benefit: Less skilled API users. The one who wants "simple and easy to use".
- More comments:
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 17:47, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
No please, JSON or XML is standard language to work with APIs. --Frettie (talk) 18:23, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
- Moreover, there are plenty of command-line tools for massaging JSON data (and to a lesser extent, XML as well):
- I can sympathise with wanting TSV output (it's far and away the easiest data format to parse and wrangle). It should be trivial to generate TSV output using the aforementioned tools; JQ sports a dedicated option for generating TSV-formatted output. Alhadis (talk) 19:10, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Note that historically, the API supported a text format: txt. It was removed as it was useless: instead of a sensible format as proposed, it instead outputted human-readable debug information. —Mainframe98 talk 18:45, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Voting
Neutral Although it should be for less-tech-savy users to follow around the guide, it's hard to do so. Thingofme (talk) 02:58, 12 February 2023 (UTC)- Neutral --cyrfaw (talk) 12:30, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
