Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2015)/Day 2 Projects/Wikipedia/OS X setup

Download the Wikipedia API 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/2015/cdsw-spring/wikipedia-data-examples.zip
2. The ".zip" extension on the above file indicates that it is a compressed Zip archive. We need to "extract" its contents. To do this, open Finder and navigate to your Desktop directory. Find wikipedia-data-examples.zip on your Desktop and double-click on it to "unzip" it. That will create a folder called wikipedia-data-examples containing several files.

Test the Wikipedia API code

Start a command prompt and navigate to the Desktop/wikipedia-data-examples directory where the Wikipedia API code lives. For example, if the Wikipedia API project is at ~/Desktop/wikipedia-data-examples,

cd ~/Desktop/wikipedia-data-examples

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 "wikipedia1-1.py", which has a ".py" extension indicating that it is a Python script. Type:

python wikipedia1-1.py

at the command prompt to execute the wikipedia1-1.py Python script. Wait a little while while your computer connects to Wikipedia. You should see some data from Wikipedia go by on your screen. If you don't, let a staff member know.

Success!

You are done downloading the Wikipedia API project!