Wikipedia Library For Python

Wikipedia is a Python library that makes it easy to access and parse data from Wikipedia. This extension allows you to search Wikipedia, get article summaries, get data like links and images from a page, and more. Wikipedia wraps the MediaWiki API so you can focus on using Wikipedia data, not getting it. In this short blog post I will cover a few of the features that are included with this library:

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash

To get started you will need to install the package, to install Wikipedia, simply run:

pip install wikipedia

• search pages on Wikipedia — search(),
• getting article summaries — summary,
• changing the language of a page — set_lang().
• getting full page contents, including images, links, and any other metadata of a Wikipedia page — page(),

Using the following commands above, I will demonstrate how to go about using each. As an example I will set the language to French for the output of the corresponding Wikipedia pages:

import wikipedia
wikipedia.set_lang('fr')
print(wikipedia.search('Eiffel Tower'))

With an output that looks like…

['Tour Eiffel', 'Attentats du 11 septembre 2001', 'André The Giant', 'Erika Eiffel', 'Tour de…