Web APIs hub

The Web APIs Hub invites new and experienced developers to try Wikimedia web APIs in a friendly environment.

Web APIs Hub A central place for third-party developers to use Wikimedia web APIs Group: ?? Start: 2013-12 End: 2015-10 Team members: Brad Jorsch Backlog: phab:tag/Web-APIs-Hub Lead: S Page

Problem statement

Wikimedia has made its APIs freely available, but for external developers it is difficult to figure out what they can do with our APIs, and how. Our web APIs and their documentation are currently scattered across several projects, with no central location for people to learn about and build upon them. This is the problem the Web APIs hub wants to solve.

The main target audience for this hub are developers not developing, or even running, the MediaWiki software. We want to diminish the risk of confusing them by mixing the content relevant to them with the rest of mediawiki.org. We plan to address this risk by morphing the API: namespace into the Web APIs hub, controlling and contextualizing links to other part of mediawiki.org or other Wikimedia sites. We also want to try offering a different look & feel in this namespace.

See also the ongoing list of requirements (under discussion).

Get involved

Check the Phabricator board where we are tracking all the tasks: #Web-APIs-Hub. Our goals for October-December 2015 are to:

• Map current use of Wikimedia web APIs (phab:T114017) to guide where to focus documentation effort. In addition to this analytics work, we welcome your feedback on what you find difficult or confusing.
• Write more articles (anyone can help, see /Contributing)

Provide feedback on this page's talk page

Structure

The hub is divided into three sections:

• Inspire: where cool projects are showcased; links to more detailed project description pages
• Explore: where users can play with the API(s) in functional sandboxes
• /Build: where all the static official documentation and pointers to data sets reside.

Early wireframes:

• 
  Wireframe of the hub's landing page
• 
  Alternative wireframe of the home page
• 
  Wireframe of the description page of an example project showcased on the hub
• 
  Wireframe of an API documentation page

Metrics

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T102079

phab:T102079 "Metrics about the use of the Wikimedia web APIs"

We also have stats related to engagement with www.mediawiki.org. We want to filter these down to the API: (and possibly Manual:) namespace.

• https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/ChartsWikipediaMEDIAWIKI.htm shows page views and edits for mediawiki.org (scroll right to see 2014-2015), but these aren't broken down by namespace
• https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaMEDIAWIKI.htm has various interesting counts for www.mediawiki.org, including recently active editors
• You can get page views from stats.grok.se, e.g. API:Web APIs hub page views in the last 90 days. Note mediawiki.org isn't in the http://stats.grok.se dropdown (phab:T111662).

Requirements

Personas

• Ankita, mobile developer willing to use Wikimedia data to enhance mobile apps.
• Alberto, data scientist employed at an organization gathering and releasing data that could be synced with Wikimedia's.
• Reetta, cultural activist working on mass-upload activities for public institutions.
• Yanhui, academic researcher needing a massive data set to sustain his thesis.

These represent the users we want to make happy first (phab:T92941)

Inspire

• A curated collection of projects created using data from Wikimedia projects.
• Means of submitting a project to be considered for showcase.

Build

• Documentation at different technical levels.
• An organized list of APIs and datasets available.

Community

• Way of requesting new datasets and/or APIs.
• Related news, features, and announcements.
• A way for the community to get in touch with WMF folks for help on projects.

Technical infrastructure

• Possibility to customize the UI in order to provide a pleasant user experience.
• Possibility to create and edit content comfortably, including the homepage, tutorials, project showcases, code examples and screenshots.
• Possibility to export API documentation from source code in repositories.
• Possibility to integrate API sandboxes.
• Possibility to search all the content at once.
• Possibility to translate manual documentation (not the strict API docs)

Internal resources for developers

The following is a list of resources housed across multiple locations to help developers build using Wikimedia data. Feel free to add to the list below.

Documentation

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
• /w/api.php output (self-documenting MediaWiki entry point on every wiki)
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data#API
• http://gdash.wikimedia.org/
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Client_code/Gold_standard (best practices for web API client library development)
• https://doc.wikimedia.org/ (automatically-generated PHP, JavaScript and CSS documentation)
• Wikimedia Design Style Guide with user-interface focus
• OOUI – standard user-interface library documentation and demos
• various text files and sample HTML in core/docs

API Sandbox

 Done {{ApiEx }} provides a link to "Try in sandbox", defaulting to enwiki. Also featured in devhub section of landing page.

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ApiSandbox
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox

Existing APIs

• Recent changes stream  Done Web APIs hub article
• The MediaWiki web API. It's self-documenting (Special:APIHelp) and has a sandbox. Most Wikimedia APIs are implemented as API actions or query submodules of the MediaWiki web API, including:
  • Wikidata API
  • Echo API
  • Flow API
  • Upload API
  • Commons API (but also has a specialized API at https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnus-toolserver/commonsapi.php)
  • Mobile (content) API
  • GeoData API  Done Web APIs hub article
• RESTBase (new). It's self-documenting (enwiki starting point) with a built-in sandbox
• Parsoid API
• Pageview API . Based on RESTBase, also self-documenting (root of the endpoints available).

• Language API (?)
• Account Creation API (new?, was part of abandoned Extension:SignupAPI)

Other internal(ish) projects

• http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution
• http://infodisiac.com/
• http://seealso.org/
• API:Client code (third-party client libraries for the MediaWiki web API)
  • API:Client code/Evaluations Features, maintenance status, documentation.

External examples

Developer hubs & API documentation

Best in Class human readable API documentation

• SoundCloud
• LA Metro
• Open Street Maps (writing style , but not layout or design)

Other examples:

Programmable Web

• http://www.programmableweb.com/

Twitter

• https://engineering.twitter.com/
• http://twitter.github.io/
• https://dev.twitter.com/
• https://dev.twitter.com/docs
• https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1
• https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis

Google

• https://developers.google.com
• https://developers.google.com/products/
• https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/
• https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/
• https://developers.google.com/maps/
  • https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/tutorial
  • https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/map-simple
• https://www.google.com/drive/using-drive/

Facebook

• https://developers.facebook.com/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/apis/

Evernote

• http://dev.evernote.com/
• http://dev.evernote.com/doc/
• http://dev.evernote.com/doc/reference/
• http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/authentication.php

LinkedIn

• https://developer.linkedin.com/
• https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/authentication
• https://developer.linkedin.com/rest

GitHub

• http://developer.github.com/
• http://developer.github.com/v3/
• http://developer.github.com/guides/

Amazon

• https://developer.amazon.com/
• http://aws.amazon.com/
• http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/

Dropbox

• https://www.dropbox.com/developers
• https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync
• https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore
• https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core
• https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/chooser/js
• https://www.dropbox.com/developers/dropins/saver

Instagram

• http://instagram.com/developer/
• http://instagram.com/developer/authentication/

Stripe

• https://stripe.com/docs
• https://stripe.com/docs/api/curl
  • https://readme.io may be based off this?

Paypal

• https://developer.paypal.com/
• https://developer.paypal.com/docs/
• https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/

Tumblr

• http://developers.tumblr.com/
• http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2

Last.fm

• http://www.last.fm/api
• http://www.last.fm/api/intro

Twillio

• https://www.twilio.com/
• https://www.twilio.com/docs
• https://www.twilio.com/docs/api
• https://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart

Vimeo

• http://developer.vimeo.com/
• http://developer.vimeo.com/apis
• http://developer.vimeo.com/apis/simple

Pinterest

• http://developers.pinterest.com/
• http://developers.pinterest.com/api_docs/

The Guardian

• Developer hub
• API explorer/sandbox
• App showcase

New York Times

• Developer network
• App gallery
• API console/sandbox
• API docs

Mendeley

• Developer portal
• API docs

Flickr

• https://www.flickr.com/services/api/
• https://www.flickr.com/services/developer/
• https://www.flickr.com/services/apps/about/
• https://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/

Sandbox Examples

• Swagger
• Redis

Data Sets

• https://www.quora.com/Data/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to-the-public (big list)
• http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets (another big list)
• https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
• http://www.findthedata.org/
• http://www.data.gov/
• http://data.gov.uk/
• https://www.opensciencedatacloud.org/publicdata/
• http://www.pewinternet.org/datasets/
• https://nycopendata.socrata.com/
• http://www.quandl.com/