Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Wikipedia project Linux setup

Download the WikipediaAPI project

1. Right click the following file, click "Save Target as..." or "Save link as...", and save it to your Desktop directory: http://mako.cc/teaching/2014/cdsw-autumn/WikipediaAPI.tar.gz
2. The ".tar.gz" extension on the above file indicates that it is a compressed "tarball" archive. We need to "extract" its contents. To do this, find WikipediaAPI.tar.gz on your Desktop and double-click on it. A window will pop up with some options about how to "extract" the file. Leave the defaults where they are and click the "extract" button. That will create a folder on the Desktop called WikipediaAPI containing several files.

Test the WikipediaAPI code

Start a command prompt and navigate to the Desktop/WikipediaAPI directory where the WikipediaAPI code lives. For example, if the WikipediaAPI project is at ~/Desktop/WikipediaAPI,

cd ~/Desktop/WikipediaAPI

will change you into that directory (the "~" means your home directory!), and

ls

will show you the source code files in that directory. One of the files is "wikipedia-mwc1.py", which has a ".py" extension indicating that it is a Python script. Type:

python wikipedia-mwc1.py

at the command prompt to execute the wikipedia-mwc1.py Python script. Wait a little while while your computer connects to Wikipedia. You should see data from Wikipedia run by on your screen. If you don't, let a staff member know.

Success!

You are done downloading the WikipediaAPI project!