Editing DS4UX (Spring 2016)/Panama Papers (section)

== Overview ==
In this project we will look at the viewing and editing history of a recently created Wikipedia article about a breaking news event—''[[w:Panama_Papers| Panama Papers]]''. When events of global significance occur, Wikipedia is often among the first places that people look for information about these events. By examining both the editing and viewing history of this article, we can learn a lot about how people create ''and'' consume information on Wikipedia. 

The process by which 'breaking news' articles are created on Wikipedia is [http://dgergle.soc.northwestern.edu/resources/KeeganGergleContractor_StayingInTheLoop_WikiSym2012.pdf a fascinating area of research] for data scientists who are study how humans work together. For more links to interesting research on Wikipedia, see the [[DS4UX_(Spring_2016)/Wikipedia_API#Research_using_Wikipedia_data|Resources section]] of this page.

=== Goals ===

* Understand the basic anatomy of an API request
* Have fun collecting different types of data from Wikipedia
* Practice reading API documentation
* Pracice testing API queries in an [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox API Sandbox]
* Practice reading and extending other people's code

=== Download and test the Panama Papers project ===

# Right click the following file, click "Save Target as..." or "Save link as...", and save it to your Desktop directory: https://jtmorgan.net/ds4ux/week6/panama-papers.zip
# Find <code>panama-papers.zip</code> on your Desktop and double-click on it to "unzip" it. That will create a folder called <code>panama-papers</code> containing several files.
# In PowerShell or Terminal, navigate to the <code>panama-papers</code> directory and type:

 python wikipedia-1.py

at the command prompt to execute the <code>wikipedia-1.py</code> Python script. Wait a little while while your computer connects to Wikipedia. You should see the result of a query from Wikipedia API on your screen. If you don't, let Jonathan or Ray know .

=== About the APIs ===

;Wikipedia Edit API: An API that provides data on edits to Wikipedia pages. Use the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox API sandbox] to build and test queries with this API.
* Also known as "the MediaWiki API", because it is the standard API for all sites that use [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki MediaWiki]. 
* You can use this API to edit Wikipedia, and do all sorts of other things. We will just be using [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query the Query module of the API] to gather data about individual pages and editors. 
* Example request for Panama Papers (current content of the page): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Panama_Papers&prop=revisions&rvprop=content


;Wikipedia Page View API: Use [https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc#!/Pageviews_data the (experimental!) Wikipedia page view API] to find out how many views a given Wikipedia article gets on a daily basis.
* This API is a little different than the Wikipedia edit API because it uses relative paths (<code>/.../.../</code>) instead of parameters (<code>somekey=someval&otherkey=otherval</code>).
* This API is case-sensitive, and space-sensitive (replace spaces in page titles with underscores). It also requires you to [http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp URL encode] any special characters (like !, $, # and %) that might appear in a page title.
* Example request for Panama Papers (page views 4/01 - 4/20): https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/pageviews/per-article/en.wikipedia/all-access/user/Panama_Papers/daily/20160401/20160420