CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mediawikiwikipediawikipedia-api
bsky
bsky

Reputation: 20222

How to get Wikipedia content as text by API?

I want to get Wikipedia pages as text.

I looked at the Wikipedia API from here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php which says that in order to get pages as text I need to append this to a page address:

api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=namespaces&format=txt

However, when I try appending this suffix to a normal page's address, the page is not found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=namespaces&format=txt

Following the instructions from Get Text Content from mediawiki page via API, I tried adding /api.php?action=parse&page=test to the end of the query string. Therefore, I obtained this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington/api.php?action=parse&page=test

However, this doesn't work either.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3223

Answers (2)

NVRM
NVRM

Reputation: 13087

NB: All this examples are CORS enabled.

Text only

From the precise title, as seen in the wikipedia page url:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&origin=*&prop=extracts&explaintext&titles=Sokolsky_Opening&format=json

Search relevant pages by keywords

Get IDs, get precise titles/url, get some quick text extract;

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&exlimit=max&format=json&exsentences=1&origin=*&exintro=&explaintext=&generator=search&gsrlimit=23&gsrsearch=chess

Wiki page ID

Using the precise title:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&origin=*&prop=pageprops&format=json&titles=Sokolsky_Opening

Full html

By wiki page ID, includes the Wikitext:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&origin=*&format=json&pageid=100017

Stripped html

Lighter html version, without the Wikitext.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&origin=*&prop=extracts&format=json&titles=Sokolsky_Opening

Cross origin:

About using CORS requests, sometimes it may require 2 calls to the API, to jump between ID and page title.

In a ssl context, we can use fetch to embed some wiki text anywhere.

Example remote .json.

fetch("https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&origin=*&prop=extracts&explaintext&format=json&titles=Sokolsky_Opening").then(v => v.json()).then((function(v){
    main.innerHTML = v["query"]["pages"]["100017"]["extract"]
    })
  )
<pre id="main" style="white-space: pre-wrap"></pre>

⚠️ This API has some quirks, some pages with heavy contents get truncated sometimes, among other things and possible rate limiting.

🧘 Good luck. 🜀

Upvotes: 3

Termininja
Termininja

Reputation: 7036

You have to use some of these formats: json, jsonfm, none, php, phpfm, rawfm, xml or xmlfm, so txt is not valid format. Also your API link is wrong, use this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=George_Washington&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xml

Upvotes: 1

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