It's not scraping, you're just consuming an API.
Scraping is when you're parsing human-readable content (HTML) and extracting data, as the parent comment correctly points out.
Scraping is when you're parsing human-readable content (HTML) and extracting data, as the parent comment correctly points out.
“Git scraping” would intuitively refer to extracting specific information from Git repositories. The naming in the article is therefore confusing. “Snapshotting into Git” would be more accurate. (Git itself uses the term “snapshot” for a reason.)
One of the benefits of catching them in a Git repo is that it helps you spot when their structure changes in ways that may break code that you write on top of them.
> the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped is intended for display to an end-user, rather than as an input to another program
Snapshotting JSON files can be incredibly useful, but I don't think you should call it "scraping".
It has sections covering things called "data scraping" and "web scraping" and "screen scraping" and "report mining", and links to articles about "data mining" and "data mining" and "search engine scraping" as well.
To me, that indicates that the terminology around this stuff is already extremely vague and poorly defined... and the suffix "scraping" is up for grabs for anyone who wants to further define it!
(If you don't like me calling this technique "Git scraping" you're going to /really/ hate the name I picked for my shot-scraper tool https://shot-scraper.datasette.io )
I'm less warm at this point to the general idea behind the hack of dumping the resulting JSON crawl data to GitHub. It's a very roundabout way of approaching basically what something like TerminusDB was made for. It definitely feels like the main motivation was GitHub-specific stuff and not Git, really—namely, free jobs with GitHub Actions—and everything else flowed from that. It turns out that GitHub Actions proved to be too unreliable for executing on schedule, anyway, so we ported the crawler to JS with an eye towards using Cloudflare Workers and their cron triggers (which also come in a free flavor).