Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2015)/Day 2 projects/Wikipedia

Building a Dataset using the Wikipedia API

In this project, we will explore a few ways to gather data using the Wikipedia API. Once we've done that, we will extend this to code to create our own datasets of Wikipedia edits or other data that we might be able to use to ask and answer questions in the final session.

Goals

Get set up to build datasets with the Wikipedia API
Have fun collecting different types of data from Wikipedia
Practice reading and extending other people's code
Create a few collections of different types of data from Wikipedia that you can do research with in the final section

Download and test the Wikipedia project

If you are confused by these steps, go back and refresh your memory with the Day 0 setup and tutorial and Day 0 tutorial

(Estimated time: 10 minutes)

Windows
OS X

Example topics we might cover in the lecture

explain MediaWiki, exists on other wikis
navigate to api page and show the documentation, point out examples
introduce the API sandbox as a tool for building queries
looking at the images within a page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Seattle&prop=images&imlimit=20&format=jsonfm
change the city with a custom URL
edit count http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Benjamin_Mako_Hill%7CJtmorgan%7CSj%7CKoavf&usprop=editcount&format=jsonfm
get the content of the main page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main%20Page&prop=revisions&rvprop=content

Resources