Querying Wikipedia DB

[sist_si]

Hi everyone,
Does anyone know if it's possible to 'embed' the wikipedia database into your site? I want to be able to pull back info on bands into the content of my website.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ta!

 

[Augmented]

There's no API currently available for Wikipedia to allow you to pull data off their DB in a clean manner; though there is apparently one in the works. Best you're going to have is to screen-scrape the relevant page, and then extract the relevant data from the HTML source. It should be fairly trivial depending on how competent you are as a programmer.

Wikipedia entry URIs are fairly standardised. Start with

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Then, keyword is upper-case first-letter, and spaces are converted to underscores:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles

or the printable version might be better, e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beatles&printable=yes

Then extract all info in <div id="content"></div>.


Bear in mind the licensing of the data i.e. if you use the data, derivative works have to also be GFDL licensed (so I can scrape your site and use your derivative content ).

 

[sist_si]

ah cool. I thought I saw some kind of API being used on another site the other day and it got me thinking.
Stripping out the relevant code wouldn't be a problem tho so I'll try that I think if the licensing side of things doesn't come into play!
Cheers dude!

 

[matja]

You can freely download the entire database for wikipedia, and pull out the stuff you want. It's a rather large database dump as you can imagine, though

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070206/enwiki-20070206-pages-articles.xml.bz2