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Wikipedia API?

Wikipedia.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.

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Posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2005 at 11:39 pm in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology   |  RSS feed

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11 Responses to “Wikipedia API?”

    
  1. Sourabh Niyogi
    January 26, 2006 at 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

  2. zaki mirza
    February 13, 2007 at 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.

  3. Tux
    March 5, 2007 at 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

  4. Jake Lockley
    July 19, 2007 at 8:26 pm

    I think what you are looking for is Freebase. http://www.freebase.com

  6. Ajitesh
    July 25, 2007 at 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.

  7. Neil
    November 9, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    Is Wikipedia powered by MediaWiki software?

  8. Chris
    March 11, 2008 at 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

  9. Maria Grineva
    April 16, 2008 at 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!

  10. josh
    September 5, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    Chris, the wiki was invented by ward cunningham in the mid 90′s and the First implementation was called wikiwikiweb.

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