Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

I know that I "should" use the API to get the content of a page, but sometimes you don't care about other meta data, and action=raw is a much simpler interface to get the content of a page, so I think it should work on Wikidata, too. Currently a "415 Unsupported Media Type" is thrown.

In bug 40032 comment #1 Daniel Kinzler wrote:

> I removed support for action=raw for non-text content as a response to an
> explicit request from the core team - I think it was Tim Starling. The reason
> is that the current expectation is that this will return wikitext, and
> returning JSON or XML or whatever would break that expectation. Also, while
> we
> can communicate the serialization format using the ContentType header, there
> is
> no way to tell the client which content *model* is used, which makes it
> impossible to interpret the returned data.

I suggest to allow action=raw if an acceptable parameter ctype is set, i.e. something like action=raw&ctype=application/json or action=raw&ctype=application/x-wikibase-item should work. With such a parameter the client shows that he (1) doesn't expect wikitext, and (2) knows about the content model, which should answer the above concerns.