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Wikipedia API?

I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that they’ve got a table of just the article titles (over 1.2 million of them) in their downloads.

Some of this is related to my interest in making Wikipedia work better in an academic library context, but I’ve got other plans too. With luck, we’ll see a beta release this week.

tags: api, application programming interface, article titles, database download, free encyclopedia, hacking, rss, web services, webservices, wikipedia, xml

Posted August 21, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: api, application programming interface, article titles, database download, free encyclopedia, hacking, rss, web services, webservices, wikipedia, xml.

9 Comments

Comment by Sourabh Niyogi on January 26, 2006 9:03 pm
We’ve put a rudimentary API together that might help you in your project:

http://www.ontok.com/wikipedia
http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia
Comment by zaki mirza on February 13, 2007 11:38 am
Hey,

We recently thought of some ideas like you have to work with something like a wikipedia API to build apps and services. I wonder why one doesnt exist. Are you working on this still? can you share with me? drop in at my blog.
Comment by Tux on March 5, 2007 3:36 am
I have a Simple Wikipedia API I created at my site, see if it works for you. http://www.killertux.com/node/44
Comment by Jake Lockley on July 19, 2007 8:26 pm
I think what you are looking for is Freebase. http://www.freebase.com
Comment by anony on July 20, 2007 8:27 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/Query_API/User_Manual

hth
Comment by Ajitesh on July 25, 2007 12:59 pm
Thats actually prove to be a very useful thing to have wiki apis. Wiki must also move to have readily available APIs similar to facebook.
Comment by Neil on November 9, 2007 6:19 pm
Is Wikipedia powered by MediaWiki software?
Comment by Chris on March 11, 2008 10:17 pm
Neil: yes, Wikipedia is powered by (and owned by) MediaWiki. I think they started it all, the whole wiki thing; or at least popularised it.

Have you tried their API and seeing if it works for Wikipedia?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
Comment by Maria Grineva on April 16, 2008 4:45 am
Take a look at WikiXMLDB

http://wikixmldb.dyndns.org/

It provides a way to query Wikipedia in XQuery.

Wikipedia dump was parsed into XML and loaded into Sedna XML database. Now you have the flexibility and power of XQuery applied to rich Wikipedia content!