User:Conrad.Irwin/How about an API

An API supporting the following type of queries would be a very useful start to creating a higher-level interface to Wiktionary (this is not example syntax, just ideas)

FIND synonyms FOR en:dog
FIND translations FOR en:dog WHERE targetlanguage=fr
FIND antonyms, anagrams FOR fr:chien
FIND * FOR dog

In order to add this to Wiktionary without necessitating editing each of our million pages, I propose adding a parser function {{#store}} that could be used in our current templates.

{{#store:translation|dog|en|noun|targetlanguage=fr|translation=chien}}
{{#store:synonym|dog|en|noun|synonym=pooch}}

Each piece of data is indexed by the un-named fields, and contains the information in the named fields. The un-named fields would be "word, language, part-of-speech, context", though part-of-speech and context may be optional. In order for this to work, a second extension might be needed that could keep track of what language and part-of-speech the part of the entry was; by looking at the headers - this could be done quite nicely using a simple custom extension with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VariablesExtension.

I would then propose a SpecialPage that would allow Sysops (or just Technocrats) to define what form each type of "store" command could take.

A translation OF language, word HAS targetlanguage, translation
A synonym OF language, word HAS synonym

Once all of the above was working nicely, I might add a SpecialPage that allows the specification of additional parsing rules in order to create further {{#store}} commands from formatting.

CONVERT ^#\s*([^#:*].*)$ INTO {{#store:definition|Conrad.Irwin/How about an API|{{#var:LANGUAGE}}|{{#var:PARTOFSPEECH}}|definition=$1}}