Landrace.Wiki:API

ℹ️

This is a project information page for Landrace.Wiki. It describes the project's standards, processes, or structure. It is not an encyclopaedic article.

Landrace.wiki publishes its accession data and the rest of its structured data through a public, read-only HTTP API. Reading needs no account or API key. Responses come back as JSON. The data is stored as Semantic MediaWiki properties: a query selects any set of accessions by category and property and returns the fields it asks for.

This page describes the endpoints, the accession properties and their types, the coordinates, the licence and how to cite the data.

Endpoints

Base URL: https://landrace.wiki/api.php

Semantic queries

The Semantic MediaWiki API answers queries over the property store. Two forms take the same conditions.

action=ask takes a whole query in one parameter, written as it would be on Special:Ask:

https://landrace.wiki/api.php?action=ask
  &query=[[Category:Accessions]][[Has country::Cambodia]]|?Has descriptive name|?Has collection date|limit=50
  &format=json

action=askargs splits conditions, printouts and parameters into separate fields, each pipe-delimited:

https://landrace.wiki/api.php?action=askargs
  &conditions=Category:Accessions|Has country::Cambodia
  &printouts=Has descriptive name|Has collection date
  &parameters=limit=50
  &format=json

Several conditions in one query are combined with AND. A condition of the form [[Has coordinates::+]] selects the pages that have any value for the property. Spaces and special characters in a URL are percent-encoded as usual (%20 for a space, %3A%3A for ::).

A query returns as many rows as its limit allows. When more rows match, the response carries query-continue-offset. Repeating the query with offset set to that value returns the next rows.

MediaWiki action API

The standard MediaWiki action API runs at the same base URL. action=query returns page text, revisions and category members; action=parse returns rendered output. Category members, for example:

https://landrace.wiki/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers
  &cmtitle=Category:Accessions&cmlimit=max&format=json

Automated access

Scripts and harvesters read the data through api.php. Requests for ordinary pages and special pages pass through a network security service that may ask a browser to complete a short automatic check, which automated clients cannot do; the Privacy policy describes that service. The site runs on shared hosting. Clients are expected to:

• send a descriptive User-Agent header naming the client and giving a contact address
• make one request at a time, a few seconds apart
• cache responses
• write to privacy@landrace.wiki before any regular or large harvest

Traffic that loads the server heavily may be slowed or blocked without notice.

Response format

An ask or askargs response holds the matching pages under query.results, keyed by page title. Each entry has a printouts object that maps each requested property to an array of values, since any property can hold more than one value. query.meta gives the count and the query time.

Values keep their type:

• Page: an object naming the target page (fulltext, fullurl), so a place or a collector is returned as a link to its page
• Text: a string
• Number: a number
• Quantity: a value with its unit; elevation is in metres
• Date: an object with timestamp and raw. A date stored to the year or the month keeps that precision in raw
• Geographic coordinates: an object with lat and lon in decimal degrees
• URL: a string

Accession properties

Every accession page is in Category:Accessions, which holds 1691 pages. The tables list each property the accession template stores. The type and the number of accessions with a value are read from the property store whenever this page is rendered, so they match the live data. A purged page shows the current figures. Special:Properties lists every property on the wiki with its type and use count. Special:Browse shows every value stored on one page.

Identity and names

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has accession ID	Page	1691
Has descriptive name	Text	1691
Has classification	Text	1688
Has accession type	Text	954
Has selection type	Text	183
Has local name	Text	401
Has pronunciation	Text	307
Has vernacular translation	Text	211
Has synonyms	Text	55
Has image	Text	466
Has image caption	Page	468

Place

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has country	Page	1689
Has province	Page	1375
Has admin 2	Page	552
Has admin 2 label	Text	140
Has admin 3	Page	263
Has admin 3 label	Text	74
Has admin 4	Page	178
Has admin 4 label	Text	72
Has locality	Page	1181
Has coordinates	Geographic coordinates	1132
Has coordinate uncertainty	Quantity	635
Has georeference basis	Text	761
Has elevation	Quantity	539
Has aspect	Text	119
Has gene pool	Page	25
Has regional complex	Page	26
Has growing region	Page	741
Has growing area	Page	629
Has appellation	Page	242
Has field	Page	34

Collection and provenance

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has collection method	Text	1689
Has sourcing type	Text	1662
Has autochtonous	Text	604
Has collection date	Date	1139
Has sample harvest date	Date	466
Has collector	Page	1125
Has farmer name	Text	79
Has expedition ID	Page	409
Has ethnic group	Page	13
Has seed sourcing	Text	270

Preserved specimens

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has specimen repository	Text	643
Has catalogue number	Text	641
Has occurrence ID	URL	565
Has collector number	Text	511
Has scientific name	Text	719
Has identified by	Text	223

Seed lots

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has seed quantity	Number	58
Has seed weight	Quantity	1
Has seed viability	Text	33
Has seed storage location	Text	1046

Plant description

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has pollination type	Text	347
Has sexual characteristics	Text	411
Has photoperiod response	Text	525
Has minimum flowering time	Quantity	448
Has maximum flowering time	Quantity	444
Has minimum height	Quantity	324
Has maximum height	Quantity	348
Has growth pattern	Text	272
Has branching	Text	108
Has leaf shape	Text	392
Has leaflet count	Number	146
Has serration	Text	74
Has leaf color	Text	262
Has stem color	Text	119
Has stigma color	Text	90
Has flower structure	Text	0
Has chemotype	Text	3
Has terpene profile	Text	1
Has aroma	Text	268
Has effects	Text	164

Population, cultivation and use

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has population estimate	Number	135
Has male female ratio	Number	285
Has population hermaphroditism	Quantity	281
Has culling	Text	324
Has perceived introgression level	Text	433
Has cultivation status	Text	590
Has cultivation scale	Text	366
Has cultivation system type	Text	478
Has planting method	Text	209
Has observed soil type	Text	0
Has soil pH	Number	0
Has cycle 1 earliest planting	Text	290
Has cycle 1 latest planting	Text	290
Has cycle 1 harvest start	Text	345
Has cycle 1 harvest end	Text	343
Has cycle 2 earliest planting	Text	65
Has cycle 2 latest planting	Text	65
Has cycle 2 harvest start	Text	65
Has cycle 2 harvest end	Text	65
Has primary purpose	Text	516
Has processing method	Page	314
Has processing notes	Text	184
Has legal enforcement threats	Text	398
Has eradication date	Date	1

Relationships between accessions

Property	Type	Accessions with a value
Has parent accession	Page	40
Has related accession	Page	138
Has same population accessions	Page	21
Has mother plant ID	Page	0
Has father plant ID	Page	0
Has regional corroboration	Page	430
Has population corroboration	Page	35
Has identity confirmation	Page	29

Notes on particular properties

• Has collection date is the date of collection, stored to the precision the source gives (year, month or day).
• Has sample harvest date is a year. For a seed lot grown out from an earlier collection it is the year of that grow-out, not the date of the original collection.
• Has elevation is in metres.
• Has occurrence ID is a link to the holding institution's record of the specimen, or to its record on GBIF. It is not always the identifier the institution itself publishes for the specimen.
• Has catalogue number sometimes holds the numbers of several sheets of one gathering in one value.
• Has admin 2 label, Has admin 3 label and Has admin 4 label name the kind of administrative unit at that level in the country concerned, such as District, Subdistrict or Tehsil.

Preserved specimens and Darwin Core

Herbarium sheets and other preserved specimens are accessions like any other. They carry Has collection method = Herbarium specimen. Seed lots carry Seeds. A query for the specimens alone:

https://landrace.wiki/api.php?action=ask
  &query=[[Category:Accessions]][[Has collection method::Herbarium specimen]]|?Has specimen repository|?Has catalogue number|?Has scientific name|limit=50
  &format=json

The nearest Darwin Core terms:

Property or value	Darwin Core
Has collection method = Herbarium specimen	basisOfRecord = PreservedSpecimen
Has collection method = Seeds	basisOfRecord = LivingSpecimen
Has specimen repository	the holding institution, published under institutionCode in the holder's own code
Has catalogue number	catalogNumber
Has collector number	recordNumber (the number, without the collector's name)
Has scientific name	scientificName, as determined on the sheet
Has identified by	identifiedBy
Has occurrence ID	a link to the same specimen elsewhere (associatedOccurrences), not this accession's occurrenceID
Has collection date	eventDate
Has elevation	minimumElevationInMeters and maximumElevationInMeters

Links to other repositories

An accession that is also held or sequenced elsewhere links to that record through {{External accession}}. Each link is stored as a subobject of the accession page with seven properties: Has external repository (Page), Has external identifier (Text), Has external URL (URL), Has external accession type (Text), Has external relation (Text), Has external accession date (Date) and Has external note (Text). A query returns one row per link, with the accession page as -Has subobject:

https://landrace.wiki/api.php?action=ask
  &query=[[Has external repository::+]]|?Has external repository|?Has external identifier|?Has external URL|?-Has subobject=Accession|limit=100
  &format=json

Metadata embedded in accession pages

Each accession page carries a Schema.org Dataset block in JSON-LD in its HTML head. It gives the accession ID as identifier, the page address, the licence, a list of keywords, spatialCoverage (the place and, where the accession has coordinates, a GeoCoordinates point) and temporalCoverage (the year of collection). The block names Landrace.wiki as its creator and publisher. Where an accession records the institution or seed bank that holds the material, that holder appears as provider, by name only. Where it records a collector who is a named person, that person appears as contributor.

The Privacy policy states:

GPS coordinates stored on accession pages and published on maps are deliberately obfuscated by approximately 500 m. Precise coordinates are never published.

Has coordinates therefore returns the obfuscated point. Points on herbarium specimens and on some seed lots are placed from the specimen label or from the source that documents the lot. Such a point may mark a settlement or a district, not a collection site. Where an accession carries them, Has coordinate uncertainty gives the uncertainty of its point and Has georeference basis what the point was placed from. A reuser who reprojects, aggregates or maps the points should carry that uncertainty forward and not treat the values as precise.

Licence

Text on Landrace.wiki is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The copyright page extends it to the data:

The same licence applies to the structured data exposed via the wiki's API and to the Schema.org metadata embedded in page output.

A dataset built from the API carries the licence's conditions: it credits Landrace.wiki, links to the licence and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible licence. Two kinds of material fall outside it:

• Files (photographs, scans and other media) carry their own licences, given on each file page.
• Data republished from external scientific or institutional sources keeps the terms those sources set. Some herbaria publish their specimen records under a non-commercial licence.

The copyright page also sets out the limits that farmer privacy places on reuse: attempts to reverse the coordinate obfuscation or to combine the data with other sources to identify a grower are not uses the project sanctions.

How to cite

Accession pages change as sources are added, so a citation names the revision used. The permanent link in each page's tools menu gives the revision's address.

A single accession:

Landrace.wiki contributors. "Adrianov 239 (1926)". Landrace.wiki, revision 23420. https://landrace.wiki/index.php?oldid=23420. Accessed 15 October 2026. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Data retrieved through the API:

Landrace.wiki contributors. Landrace.wiki accession data, retrieved through the Semantic MediaWiki API on 15 October 2026. Query: [[Category:Accessions]][[Has country::Cambodia]]. https://landrace.wiki/api.php. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A citation of retrieved data gives the query and the retrieval date, since the result changes as the wiki grows.

Downloads

Bulk downloads of the accession data are not yet published. Until they are, the API is the route to the full data set.

Changes

Properties are occasionally renamed, merged or retyped. A query names its properties, so a client that depends on one should check its type here or on Special:Properties after a failure. Changes to the endpoints described here are recorded on this page.

See also

• Landrace.Wiki:About
• Landrace.Wiki:Privacy policy
• Landrace Wiki:Copyrights
• Special:Properties: every property, with its type and use count
• Special:Ask: the query form in the browser
• Semantic MediaWiki API documentation
• MediaWiki action API documentation