--- name: University of the Witwatersrand description: University of the Witwatersrand public developer/API footprint review for APIs.json cataloging. url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/university-of-the-witwatersrand/refs/heads/main/review.yml created: '2026-06-03' modified: '2026-08-30' reviews: - date: '2026-06-03' rating: 2 summary: >- Wits has no central developer portal, but its library/open-research stack exposes solid standards-based APIs. Verified live: the WIReDSpace DSpace 9.2 REST API root and the WIReDSpace OAI-PMH Identify response. The Wits Open Data Vault (Figshare, 2025) is confirmed via official sources but its portal blocks bots (403), so the Figshare public API and announcement page are cataloged instead of an institutional URL. No SIS/timetable/student API and no confirmed central institutional GitHub org were found. No endpoints were fabricated. endpoints: - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api status: 200 note: DSpace 9.2 REST API root, HAL/JSON, verified live. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/oai/request?verb=Identify status: 200 note: OAI-PMH 2.0 Identify, repositoryName "WIReDSpace", verified live. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/oai/request status: 404 note: Legacy DSpace OAI path; not used by DSpace 9.x (use /server/oai/request). - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/ status: 200 note: WIReDSpace repository UI (DSpace, LYRASIS). - url: https://wits.figshare.com/ status: 403 note: Wits Open Data Vault Figshare portal; blocks automated fetches. - url: https://api.figshare.com/v2 status: 200 note: Figshare public REST API powering the Open Data Vault (institutional filter via params). - url: https://www.wits.ac.za/ status: 200 note: Official university homepage, "Home - Wits University". - url: https://github.com/WitsSoftDev status: 200 note: Wits Maths Sciences Software Development Group org; departmental, not central institutional org. - url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/university-of-the-witwatersrand/ status: 999 note: Official LinkedIn school page; LinkedIn returns 999 to automated fetches (bot-blocked). - date: '2026-08-30' rating: 3 summary: >- University-pipeline re-profile with the operator axis applied. The June profile credited Wits with the generic Figshare v2 API contract (api.figshare.com/v2) and nine of its per-tag splits — altmetric, articles, authors, institutions, oauth, other, profiles, projects, symplectic — all of them Figshare's engineering shipped under the Wits slug, and all of them baseURL'd in apis.yml to wiredspace.wits.ac.za, a host they never touch. Those ten specs and everything derived from them were removed. A tenth contract, the collections API, had been welded by the per-tag split across two source specs: twenty-one Figshare /collections and /account/collections paths carrying two genuine DSpace /core/collections paths. It was repaired from its true parent, not deleted. All thirty request-collection artifacts, including the five describing DSpace-only operations, carried the title "Figshare altmetric ..." and baseUrl https://api.figshare.com/v2; the nine vendor ones were removed and the six institution ones re-based. What survives is real and was probed live: WIReDSpace DSpace 9.2 REST, WIReDSpace OAI-PMH 2.0 with thirteen metadata prefixes, and a new find — the Wits SAML 2.0 identity provider, registered in SAFIRE and published to eduGAIN. The Open Data Vault is now recorded correctly as a Figshare tenant on opendata.wits.ac.za (CNAME proxy-eu-01.figshare.com), with DOIs under the Wits DataCite prefix 10.71796 — an institutional fact whose contract is still the vendor's. Expect this repo's score to fall; the number it had was Figshare's. endpoints: - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api status: 200 note: DSpace 9.2 REST root, 80 endpoint links, HAL/JSON. Institution-operated. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/oai/request?verb=Identify status: 200 note: OAI-PMH 2.0, repositoryName WIReDSpace, adminEmail openscholarship.library@wits.ac.za. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/oai/request?verb=ListMetadataFormats status: 200 note: Thirteen prefixes - oai_dc, qdc, dim, mets, mods, ore, didl, rdf, marc, etdms, rioxx, uketd_dc, xoai. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/opensearch/service status: 200 note: OpenSearch 1.1 description document; a second standards-based query surface. - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api/authn/status status: 200 note: '"authenticated": false - anonymous read confirmed, no credential needed.' - url: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api/ldn/ldnservices status: 401 note: COAR Notify / LDN endpoints advertised in the root but auth-gated; presence unreadable anonymously. - url: https://idp.wits.ac.za/safss/saml2/idp/metadata.php status: 200 note: >- NEW FIND. SAML 2.0 IdP metadata, content-type application/samlmetadata+xml, entityID https://idp.wits.ac.za/safss/saml2/idp/metadata.php, shibmd:Scope wits.ac.za and students.wits.ac.za. Institution-operated. - url: https://metadata.safire.ac.za/safire-prod-idp.xml status: 200 note: >- SAFIRE federation aggregate, 37 entities; Wits registry-id 000021, publish-to-edugain true, REFEDS Research and Scholarship category. - url: https://api.datacite.org/clients?query=witwatersrand status: 200 note: DataCite repository client wits.figshare, 214 DOIs under prefix 10.71796. - url: https://opendata.wits.ac.za/ status: 202 note: >- Wits Open Data Vault. CNAME proxy-eu-01.figshare.com; AWS WAF challenge (x-amzn-waf-action: challenge) to automated fetches. Live, tenant-operated. - url: https://self-service.wits.ac.za/ status: 401 note: Student self-service; authenticated, no public API surface. - url: https://api.wits.ac.za/ status: 0 note: NXDOMAIN. No central API host exists. - url: https://data.wits.ac.za/ status: 0 note: NXDOMAIN. No CKAN/Socrata open-data portal. - url: https://www.wits.ac.za/course-finder/ status: 200 note: Course finder is HTML only; no machine-readable course/timetable interface behind it. - url: https://www.wits.ac.za/ai-policies/ status: 200 note: Institutional AI policy hub; governance document, not an API artifact. - url: https://www.wits.ac.za/robots.txt status: 200 note: Served as RTF rather than plain text - the robots directives are wrapped in RTF control words.