Editing DS4UX (Spring 2016)/Wikipedia API (section)

=== Wikipedia basics: edits, pages, and editors ===

Every time an editor (like you!) makes an edit (or ''revision'') to a page on Wikipedia, some information about that edit (called metadata) is saved, along with the text of the page after the edit was made. All of the edits ever made to any page on Wikipedia can be viewed in that page's ''revision history''. When you click the 'view history' tab at the top-right of any Wikipedia article to see metadata about all the edits made to that article, in reverse chronological order. You can also click links on this list to see more information about what the page looked like after the edit, to see what was changed, and to find out more about the person who made the edit.

You can access all of this information (and much more) by ''querying'' the MediaWiki API. Go to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php api page] on any wiki to show API documentation or check out the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page main documentation for the MediaWiki API on the MedaiWiki website].

In the sections below, I will describe some types of metadata that you can gather about edits, editors, and pages through the API.