Wikipedia’s Best Kept Secret | בלוג לשיווק באינטרנט, ייעוץ שיווקי וחיים באינטרנט

Wikipedia's Best Kept Secret

9 בדצמבר, 2008 מאת סאנטריידר

WordPress has an API for remote editing, via the XML-RPC protocol. But did you know that MedidWiki (the wiki platform used by Wikipedia) has an API as well?! — However it remains sadly unexploited at the moment.

Any Wikipedia "integration" that currently exists on the web consists mostly of automatic linking of words to their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Just take a look at the available Wiki-abled extensions available at WordPress.org — their functionality is very unsophisticated.

Just as the blogging community has an array of Weblog Clients to their disposal (Windows Live Writer, Deepest Sender, etc), the Wikipedia community (that is, the hundreds of millions who read or contribute to the free encyclopedia in its various languages) could definitely use a MediaWiki Client.

Mac OS users are exceptionally treated in this case. If you have a Mac, you can download a fancy dashboard widget that's used for viewing and editing Wikipedia articles. But this is useless for most people.

Developers can make use of available modules (like this one written in perl), but again, this is useless for most people.

What we need is a distributed Wikipedia, that can be embedded and edited outside of wikipedia.org, in order to make it more accessible to readers, publishers, and contributors.

Just recently, Wikipedia has received a grant of $890,000 from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation to make Wikipedia's writing and editing interface easier to use for first-time authors. I suggest they use this money to improve the API and to push forward the development of various applications (Wiki Clients) and web services (on-site widgets) that use it.

P.S.

Henry Blodget wrote 11 months ago:

Wikipedia needs to introduce a full API to its content, editing, and moderation systems. Using today's technology, there's no reason why developers shouldn't be able to integrate Wikipedia into their own sites; and if developers are willing to abide by the standards of Wikipedia, there's no reason not to allow editing and moderation to occur in a distributed fashion either.

When you think of it, the fact that Wikipedia's content is not easily distributable through an API, and editable too, is surprising. Newer, Wikipedia-type products — like Freebase — have extensive APIs for the greater community. Even BricaBox will have an API for public content within its first year after launch.

And so I say it's time — and with the Knol soon to come out, there's no better time:

Open Wikipedia. Give us an API. Allow us to display content easily and anywhere. And allow the beauty of Wikipedia to exist throughout the rest of the Internet.

Finally, I suggest you take a sneak peak at the API, just to be convinced that it does actually exist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=israel&format=xml

שתפו ותהנו :-)