MediaWiki API help

Which action to perform.

The format of the output.

Maximum lag can be used when MediaWiki is installed on a database replicated cluster. To save actions causing any more site replication lag, this parameter can make the client wait until the replication lag is less than the specified value. In case of excessive lag, error code maxlag is returned with a message like Waiting for $host: $lag seconds lagged.
See Manual: Maxlag parameter for more information.

Set the s-maxage HTTP cache control header to this many seconds. Errors are never cached.

Set the max-age HTTP cache control header to this many seconds. Errors are never cached.

Verify the user is logged in if set to user, or has the bot user right if bot.

Verify the current user is the named user.

Any value given here will be included in the response. May be used to distinguish requests.

Include the hostname that served the request in the results.

Include the current timestamp in the result.

Include the languages used for uselang and errorlang in the result.

When accessing the API using a cross-domain AJAX request (CORS), set this to the originating domain. This must be included in any pre-flight request, and therefore must be part of the request URI (not the POST body).

For authenticated requests, this must match one of the origins in the Origin header exactly, so it has to be set to something like https://en.wikipedia.org or https://meta.wikimedia.org. If this parameter does not match the Origin header, a 403 response will be returned. If this parameter matches the Origin header and the origin is whitelisted, the Access-Control-Allow-Origin and Access-Control-Allow-Credentials headers will be set.

For non-authenticated requests, specify the value *. This will cause the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to be set, but Access-Control-Allow-Credentials will be false and all user-specific data will be restricted.

Language to use for message translations. action=query&meta=siteinfo with siprop=languages returns a list of language codes, or specify user to use the current user's language preference, or specify content to use this wiki's content language.

Format to use for warning and error text output.

plaintext

Wikitext with HTML tags removed and entities replaced.

wikitext

Unparsed wikitext.

html

HTML.

raw

Message key and parameters.

none

No text output, only the error codes.

bc

Format used prior to MediaWiki 1.29. errorlang and errorsuselocal are ignored.

Language to use for warnings and errors. action=query&meta=siteinfo with siprop=languages returns a list of language codes, or specify content to use this wiki's content language, or specify uselang to use the same value as the uselang parameter.

If given, error texts will use locally-customized messages from the MediaWiki namespace.