API:Edit
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This page is part of the MediaWiki API documentation. |
Language: | English • Deutsch • español • français • 日本語 • Tiếng Việt • 中文 |
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Quick overview:
- Quick start guide
- FAQ
- Tutorial
- Formats
- Error reporting
- Restricting usage
- Cross-site requests
- Authentication
- Queries
- Search suggestions
- Parsing wikitext and expanding templates
- Purging pages' caches
- Parameter information
- Changing wiki content
- Watchlist feed
- Wikidata
- Extensions
- Using the API in MediaWiki and extensions
- Miscellaneous
- Implementation
- Client code
MediaWiki version: | = 1.13 |
Requires the selected MediaWiki to have the following configuration settings set to true
: $wgEnableAPI
and $wgEnableWriteAPI
. See Manual:DefaultSettings.php.
Contents
Token[edit | edit source]
To edit a page, an edit token is required. This token is the same for all pages, but changes at every login. If you want to protect against edit conflicts (which is wise), you also need to get the timestamp of the last revision. You can obtain these as follows: Obtaining an edit token
Result |
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The following content has been placed in a collapsed box for improved usability. |
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <api> <query> <pages> <page pageid="15580374" ns="0" title="Main Page" touched="2008-03-27T21:15:39Z" lastrevid="199631190" counter="0" length="4712" edittoken="000000000000000000+\"> <revisions> <rev revid="199631190" user="David Levy" timestamp="2008-03-20T17:26:39Z" comment="Have you tested it in every major browser at every resolution." /> </revisions> </page> </pages> </query> </api> |
The above content has been placed in a collapsed box for improved usability. |
When passing this to the Edit API, always pass the token parameter last, or at least, after the text parameter.
Editing pages[edit | edit source]
Pages can be edited and created with action=edit
.
Parameters[edit | edit source]
- Some of these parameters seem to be revised in v1.20; for the current list, see ApiEditPage::getAllowedParams(). To see the parameter list currently in use at Wikipedia, see:
{{ApiEx}}
title
: Title of the page you want to edit. Cannot be used together withpageid
.- Note: If $wgCapitalLinks is set to false, 'Article' and 'article' will not be considered as the same page, as in Wiktionary, for example.
pageid
: Page ID of the page you want to edit. Cannot be used together withtitle
section
: Section number. 0 for the top section, 'new' for a new section. Omit to act on the entire pagesectiontitle
: Title to use if creating a new section. If not specified,summary
will be used instead MW 1.19+text
: New page (or section) contenttoken
: Edit token. Especially if you are not using themd5
parameter, the token should be sent as the last parameter, or at least, after the text parameter, to prevent a bad edit from getting committed if transmission of the body is interrupted for some reason. This parameter is required.summary
: Edit summary. Also section title when section=new and sectiontitle is not setminor
: If set, mark the edit as minor [1]notminor
: If set, don't mark the edit as minor, even if you have the "Mark all my edits minor by default" preference enabled [1]bot
: If set, mark the edit as bot; even if you are using a bot account the edits will not be marked unless you set this flag [1]basetimestamp
: Timestamp of the base revision (obtained through prop=revisions&rvprop=timestamp). Used to detect edit conflicts; leave unset to ignore conflictsstarttimestamp
: Timestamp when you obtained the edit token. Used to detect edit conflicts; leave unset to ignore conflictsrecreate
: any errors about the article having been deleted in the meantime[1]createonly
: Don't edit the page if it exists already[1]nocreate
: Throw an error if the page doesn't exist[1]watch
: Add the page to your watchlist. Deprecated. Use the watchlist argumentunwatch
: Remove the page from your watchlist. Deprecated. Use the watchlist argumentwatchlist
: Specify how the watchlist is affected by this edit, set to one of "watch", "unwatch", "preferences", "nochange":watch
: add the page to the watchlistunwatch
: remove the page from the watchlistpreferences
: use the preference settings (Default)nochange
: don't change the watchlist
md5
: MD5 hash (hex) of thetext
parameter or theprependtext
andappendtext
parameters concatinated. If this parameter is set and the hashes don't match, the edit is rejected. This can be used to guard against data corruptionprependtext
: Add this text to the beginning of the page. Overrides textappendtext
: Add this text to the end of the page. Overrides text. Use section=new to append a new sectionundo
: Revision ID to undo. Overridestext
,prependtext
andappendtext
undoafter
: Undo all revisions fromundo
up to but not including this one. If not set, just undo one revisionredirect
: Automatically resolve redirects[1]contentformat
: Content serialization format used for the input texttext/x-wiki
for wikitexttext/javascript
for javascripttext/css
for csstext/plain
for plaintextapplication/json
for json
contentmodel
: Content model of the new contentwikitext
javascript
css
text
JsonZeroConfig
Scribunto
JsonSchema
captchaid
: CAPTCHA ID from the previous requestcaptchaword
: Answer to the CAPTCHA
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 The presence of this variable activates its feature. For instance adding the value "recreate" with or without a value will suppress errors about the page being previously deleted.
Example[edit | edit source]
Note: In this example, all parameters are passed in a GET request just for the sake of simplicity. However, action=edit requires POST requests; GET requests will cause an error. Do not forget to set the Content-Type
header of your request to application/x-www-form-urlencoded
. The token that you received is terminated with +\
, this needs to be urlencoded (so it will end with %2B%5C
) before it is passed back. Adding a new section to en:Talk:Main Page
Result |
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The following content has been placed in a collapsed box for improved usability. |
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <api> <edit result="Success" pageid="12" title="Talk:Main Page" oldrevid="465" newrevid="471" /> </api> |
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CAPTCHAs and extension errors[edit | edit source]
If an edit requires a CAPTCHA, you'll get something like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <api> <edit result="Failure"> <captcha type="math" mime="text/tex" id="509895952" question="36 + 4 = " /> </edit> </api>
In most cases, you won't get a math CAPTCHA, but a URL to an image (in the url
field). When you've solved the CAPTCHA, retry the request (in this case with captchaid=509895952&captchaword=40
).
Other extensions that use the APIEditBeforeSave hook may return errors using either the format described above or the usual error format.
Possible errors[edit | edit source]
In addition to the usual stuff:
- code: notitle
- info: The title parameter must be set
- code: notext
- info: One of the text, appendtext, prependtext and undo parameters must be set
- code: notoken
- info: The token parameter must be set
- code: invalidsection
- info: The section parameter must be set to an integer or 'new'
- code: protectedtitle
- info: This title has been protected from creation
- code: cantcreate
- info: You don't have permission to create new pages
- code: cantcreate-anon
- info: Anonymous users can't create new pages
- code: articleexists
- info: The article you tried to create has been created already
- code: noimageredirect-anon
- info: Anonymous users can't create image redirects
- code: noimageredirect
- info: You don't have permission to create image redirects
- code: spamdetected
- info: Your edit was refused because it contained a spam fragment: ``wikitext''
- code: filtered
- info: The filter callback function refused your edit
- code: contenttoobig
- info: The content you supplied exceeds the article size limit of bytes bytes
- code: noedit-anon
- info: Anonymous users can't edit pages
- code: noedit
- info: You don't have permission to edit pages
- code: pagedeleted
- info: The page has been deleted since you fetched its timestamp
- code: emptypage
- info: Creating new, empty pages is not allowed
- code: emptynewsection
- info: Creating empty new sections is not possible.
- code: editconflict
- info: Edit conflict detected
- code: revwrongpage
- info: rrevid is not a revision of ``pagename''
- Thrown if an invalid revid is given for
undo
orundoafter
- Thrown if an invalid revid is given for
- info: rrevid is not a revision of ``pagename''
- code: undo-failure
- info: Undo failed due to conflicting intermediate edits
- code: missingtitle
- (see above nocreate parameter)
Editing via Ajax[edit | edit source]
Below is sample code for editing a page via an Ajax request:
function addNewSection( summary, content, editToken ) { $.ajax({ url: mw.util.wikiScript( 'api' ), data: { format: 'json', action: 'edit', title: mw.config.get( 'wgPageName' ), section: 'new', summary: summary, text: content, token: editToken }, dataType: 'json', type: 'POST', success: function( data ) { if ( data && data.edit && data.edit.result == 'Success' ) { window.location.reload(); // reload page if edit was successful } else if ( data && data.error ) { alert( 'Error: API returned error code "' + data.error.code + '": ' + data.error.info ); } else { alert( 'Error: Unknown result from API.' ); } }, error: function( xhr ) { alert( 'Error: Request failed.' ); } }); }
Large texts[edit | edit source]
When using texts over 8000 characters, use "multipart/form-data" as it does not require escaping and will be significantly smaller than its urlencoded counterpart. Multipart has roughly 160 bytes of overhead for each parameter, so for seven parameters that's ~1.1kb overhead. Example:
POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Bot Framework Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Host: en.wikipedia.org Cookie: <removed> Content-Length: 1348 Accept-Encoding: gzip Connection: Keep-Alive -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="action" edit -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="title" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Title here -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Text here -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="summary" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Summary -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="token" 1f287ba00a908e9622045e7b18ffa352+\ -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="assert" user -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="format" xml -----------------------------8ce61ec834cf268--