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A comment on Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit. Parent comment

Re:Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit by nonameiguess on Thursday August 19, 2021 @11:20AM (#28234989)
Unlike APIs, html class/tag names or whatever provide no stability guarantees. The site owner can break your parser whenever they want for any reason. They can do that with an API, but usually won't since some guarantee of stability is the point of an API.
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Re:Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit by billpg on Thursday August 19, 2021 @02:23PM (#28237376)
True, but the analysis was done on files downloaded over the span of two or three days. If someone had decided to change the CSS class of an infobox during that time, I'd have noticed, investigated and adjusted my code appropriately.
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Re:Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit by pigsonthewing on Friday August 20, 2021 @08:19AM (#28245199)
"html class/tag names or whatever provide no stability guarantees"

Not quite. Many Wikipedia infoboxes (and some other templates) use standardised class names from microformats such as hCard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Microformats

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