The “write” portion of the Wikipedia API has been enabled. That sounds suspiciously like gibbberish, but it’s actually awesome.

Quick explanation:

Okay. There’s Wikipedia-the-website, which is a bunch of pages that exist at particular URLs and a bunch of links you can click on and a bunch of buttons you can push. But there’s also Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia, which is just a huge pile of data (every revision of an article, for example, living side by side in a database).*

The website is just an interface to the data — and it’s only one possible interface of many, because something exists called the Wikipedia API. API stands for Application programming interface — basically, it means that anybody can send Wikipedia a terse message saying “give me a copy of this article”, or “tell me whether this user exists”, or whatever, instead of trying to retrieve the data by actually downloading HTML pages from wikipedia.org and chugging through them.

Up until now, you could use the API for a lot of things — and in fact Apple uses it to power the wikipedia search inside the dictionary application.

But you couldn’t actually edit Wikipedia through the API — that’s what changed today. Maybe we’ll see some real Wikipedia-browsing apps using core animation for moving diff views, etc.

Get on it, mac programmers! Don’t you want to be able to click on any sentence in an article and instantly see who wrote it, what other sentences they wrote, and how long the sentence has existed? (And that’s just the stuff that was already possible without the write API.) I’d code something myself if I wasn’t a terrible, terrible programmer.

*And there’s also Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia-in-the-abstract, which doesn’t live any place in particular.

Posted Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:52:43 and filed under news, gadgets. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.