Question

I’m trying to edit a section on a page on Wikipedia, but when I do so the whole section gets replaced by whatever text I send through the URL, even the heading, so it stops being a section. Is there any way to edit a section without deleting the heading?

So far, the function I’m using (having admittedly stolen it from a documentation page) is as follows:

function editSection(section, summary, content, editToken) {
    $.ajax({
        url: mw.util.wikiScript('api'),
        data: {
            format: 'json',
            action: 'edit',
            title: mw.config.get('wgPageName'),
            section: section,
            summary: summary,
            text: content,
            token: editToken
        },
        dataType: 'json',
        type: 'POST',
        success: function(data) {
            if (data && data.edit && data.edit.result == 'Success') {
        window.location.reload();
            } else if (data && data.error) {
                alert('Error: API returned error code "' + data.error.code + '": ' + data.error.info);
            } else {
                alert('Error: Unknown result from API.');
            }
        },
        error: function(xhr) {
            alert('Error: Request failed.');
        }
    });
}

to get my edit token, I use

function getEditToken() {
    $.getJSON(
        'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?', {
            action: 'tokens',
            type: 'edit',
            format: 'json'
        },
        function(data) {
            if (data.tokens) {
                wgEditToken = data.tokens.edittoken;
            }
        }
    )
}

help please!

Answer 1

Yes, the heading is part of the section. So if you don’t want to replace (or even delete) it, you will need to send it as a part of the text. However, if you don’t want to completely overwrite a section, you have already queried the section’s text [content], don’t you?

Btw: you might use the mw.user.tokens map to get the token, instead of manually retrieving it.