Forum:Minecraft Data Availability

Hi,

Having kids in Primary School that enjoy Minecraft a bit to much they always keep bugging me for questions. Most of the time I end up on minecraft.wiki and figure things out for them, but I rather like them to figure things out by themselves. I think the overload of information and the way it is presented doesn't work well for young children, who often have very practical questions.

I am currently working on developing skills to become a full stack developer, and for a personal project I would like to build a reformed minecraft wiki that my kids can navigate. Mostly I will be looking at limited display of information, more pictures/tables and perhaps a way to compare or calculate tool vs block, or weapon vs mob. I haven't worked out the exact details yet, as it will be a bit of try and error to find the right balance. But I would like to use this project to display my skills as a developer working with a database.

I am looking to get get access to the actual data (database) that this wiki is build upon. Is this something that is available to the public as Open Source? Or are there other sources available? My apologies if my interest doesn't line up with this wiki, or that I am in the wrong place. Since there is an overlapping interest here in proving information I thought I might start here.

Obviously I could alter the wiki pages until I get the result that I am after, but this wouldn't help my (introduction) portfolio as a developer displaying my skills. As that would all be done by the wiki framework. Scrapping is another option, but since wiki is based upon Open Source and communities, I thought it better to ask first. --It Jeroen (talk) 02:02, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

It's kind-of a mixed bag. About a quarter to a third or so of what's presented as data has been manually entered, the other part resides in Lua modules (see Lua-based templates; from what I can tell from your question, most aren't relevant to your goal). An additional set of templates also present their data through usage of DPL, which may or may not use Lua in the back-end. Generally, the table templates category covers those. There's no actual (single) database in which all the data is stored. The wiki does have Semantic MediaWiki enabled, but only sees comparatively light use. I suppose you could look through the couple of properties the wiki counts. Hope that helps. DarkShadowTNT (talk) 22:05, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions. I am not that familiar with wiki pages except in how to read them. From what I can gather from your suggestions, DPL seems to be geared towards generating dynamic indexes of pages based upon certain criteria. I assume it could also be used, dynamically generating link referrals, in the text information generated by users. I start to understand that a lot of the content is static the way wiki is organised and being managed by people. All information is linked to a single page/topic even if it uses duplicated information from a different topic. It Jeroen (talk) 01:31, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned above already, most of our content is stored as text so it's not really something you can easily work with for tool. If you want to try and use the information anyway, just make sure to follow the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license of the wiki and you can avoid scraping by using the MediaWiki API to get the contents of a page. See also the auto-generated documentation at Special:ApiHelp for more details as well as the Special:ApiSandbox.

In any case if you have ideas on how we can make the wiki more accessible, please feel free to suggest them. We are always trying to improve the wiki in any way possible. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 15:58, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

I haven't thought about using the API, which is actually a better suggestion than scraping.

Thanks to @DarkShadowTNT I am starting to get a better idea in where I like to deviate from the wiki approach.

For suggestions, and I think this where a database would help (But can be totally wrong) I would like to limit the display of information to a specific Minecraft Edition and version.

When searching for information about animals for Java Edition version 1.19.3, a Camel would not show up, because it didn't (technically) exist for example. If you go about this way there will be a lot of overlapping information between Editions and Versions that doesn't need to be recreated. While typing this, it made me think about that people would like to know which Minecraft they would need to find a Camel. Which would need some consideration taking my approach.

In general terms I like to limit the overall display of information (wiki counterintuitive) to make it less overwhelming, and present it in a different format. (Still working that out on the fly)

For example, the Camel page, The info box present already a lot of the general information a kid is after, but takes up relatively a small area of the page.

The sound sections has a lot of technical information, more related to the sound than to the camel, and the achievement section has rather little to do with the camel at all, but rather the other way around, the camel can have something to do with accomplishing certain achievements.

The Behaviour and Riding section I would probably turn into a bullet list, and have it read like a list of short facts. (my) Kids love short facts.

This all sounds like a lot, but take into account my kids are still in Primary School. All in all, I think the use of a database would make things more flexible to try different approaches, at least for my project. It Jeroen (talk) 02:18, 13 May 2024 (UTC)