Extension:TextExtracts

For obtaining summaries in production environments, the Page Content Service is recommended and used by Wikimedia products.

MediaWiki extensions manual

TextExtracts Release status: stable
Implementation	API
Description	Provides API with plain-text or limited HTML extracts of page content
Author(s)	Max Semenik (MaxSemtalk)
Compatibility policy	Snapshots releases along with MediaWiki. Master is not backward compatible.
MediaWiki	>= 1.43
Database changes	No
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (Phabricator · GitHub) commit history repository contributors (GitHub) code review
Parameters $wgExtractsRemoveClasses $wgExtractsExtendOpenSearchXml $wgExtractsExtendRestSearch
Hooks used ApiOpenSearchSuggest SearchResultProvideDescription
Quarterly downloads	106 (Ranked 55th)
Public wikis using	2,046 (Ranked 189th)
Translate the TextExtracts extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Issues	Open tasks · Report a bug

The TextExtracts extension provides an API which allows retrieval of plain-text or limited HTML (HTML with content for some CSS classes removed) extracts of page content.

• Download and move the extracted TextExtracts folder to your extensions/ directory.
  Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/TextExtracts
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'TextExtracts' );
  

•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

• $wgExtractsRemoveClasses is an array of <tag>, <tag>.class, .<class>, #<id> which will be excluded from extraction.

  For example, $wgExtractsRemoveClasses[] = 'dl'; removes indented text, often used for non-templated hatnotes that are not desired in summaries.

  extension.json defines the defaults, of which the class "noexcerpt" is one - this may be added to any template to exclude it.

• $wgExtractsExtendOpenSearchXml defines whether TextExtracts should provide its extracts to the Opensearch API module. The default is false.

The following documentation is the output of Special:ApiHelp/query+extracts, automatically generated by the pre-release version of MediaWiki that is running on this site (MediaWiki.org).

{
    "query": {
        "pages": {
            "9228": {
                "pageid": 9228,
                "ns": 0,
                "title": "Earth",
                "extract": "Earth, also called the world and, less frequently, Gaia, (or Terra in some works of science fiction)..."
            }
        }
    }
}

There are various things to be aware of when using the API or software that uses the API e.g. Extension:Popups .

• We do not recommend the usage of `exsentences`. It does not work for HTML extracts and there are many edge cases for which it doesn't exist. For example "Arm. gen. Ing. John Smith was a soldier." will be treated as 4 sentences. We do not plan to fix this.
• Inline images are stripped from the response (even in HTML mode). This means if you are using the Math extension and using formulae in your lead section they may not appear in the summary output.
• In HTML mode we cannot guarantee well formed HTML. Resulting HTML may be invalid or malformed.
• In plaintext mode:
  • citations may not be stripped (see phab:T197266)
  • if a paragraph ends with an HTML tag e.g. ref tag, new lines may be dropped (see phab:T201946)
  • new lines may be dropped after lists phab:T208132
  • Articles must begin with the lead paragraph for an extract to be generated. The use of any template, and/or unclosed or empty HTML element may result in no preview for the article. E.g. "<div></div>hello" will give an empty extract.

TextExtracts will strip any element that is marked with the class .noexcerpt. This is provided by the $wgExtractsRemoveClasses configuration variable (which also defines some other excluded elements).

• Extension:InterwikiExtracts
• Page Content Service

This extension is being used on one or more Wikimedia projects. This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used by such high-traffic websites. Look for this extension's name in Wikimedia's CommonSettings.php and InitialiseSettings.php configuration files to see where it's installed. A full list of the extensions installed on a particular wiki can be seen on the wiki's Special:Version page.

This extension is included in the following wiki farms/hosts and/or packages: BlueSpice Canasta Debian Fandom Miraheze MyWikis ProWiki wiki.gg WikiForge This is not an authoritative list. Some wiki farms/hosts and/or packages may contain this extension even if they are not listed here. Always check with your wiki farms/hosts or bundle to confirm.