chedstone.com

Since Wikipanion is just about reading articles, not editing them, they could even have used the existing api — sometimes I wonder why so few people know about the api; maybe because it’s called the “mediawiki api” and not the “wikipedia api”.

I think that’s probably true Ben. When I clicked through to view the “Wikipedia API” in your article, it took me to the page where it said Mediawiki API.

Wikipanion does use the Wikipedia API. I’m not exactly sure what you mean when it is in an unformatted blank box, but there is quite a bit of formatting done. The amount of sub information is actually quite limited, most of the API returns various kinds of meta information which doesn’t really help you break apart the contents. I’m not really sure what ’specific information’ you’re referring to, but Wikipanion does use the API, and does as much as it can with it.

Did you create the program, if not, I’m sure they’d love to have an advocate like you. Like you said, I suppose that the API is not as robust as it should be because of meta information not being able to be broken apart and that’s why I refer to the display not being as “clean.” I will post a picture on this post so everyone can see what I’m referring to. Thanks for posting your comment!