Have you ever wondered just how many wikis ShoutWiki hosts? I bet you have, and so have we at the staff team at times. Finding that out has been easy, thanks to the {{NUMBEROFWIKIS}} magic word. But what if you have wanted to know how many of those wikis are French, for example? Or how many were created between March and April 2010?
In the past, finding out such info has been tedious and it has required the user to spend countless hours browsing ShoutWiki Hub, our main site, which contains description pages about all public (and school) wikis that we host.
Today brings a change to that with the introduction of the ShoutWiki API extension, which adds a new API module that allows fetching all kinds of information about our wikis. To find out which of our wikis are written in the French language (language code fr), query the action=listwikis module with swlang=fr parameter, like this:
http://www.shoutwiki.com/w/api.php?action=listwikis&swlang=fr
Language isn’t the only information the API module exposes; other info, such as the founder-supplied description, the wiki’s sitename ($wgSitename), creation timestamp and a lot more are available! Take a look at the help documentation that accessing api.php without any parameters produces.
We do, however, ask you to read the MediaWiki.org page about API etiquette before querying the API; basically, be considerate and don’t try to take the site down and you’ll be fine.
Please let us know your thoughts on this new API interface in the comments section!
On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,
—
Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team
