Wikipedia disambiguation error

Question

I have recently been using the wikipedia module to determine a random wikipedia page.

I have been doing this with a very large list of words, and the random.choice() module as so:

words=open("words.txt","r")
words=words.read()

words=words.split()    

text=random.choice(words)

string=random.choice(wikipedia.search(text))

p = wikipedia.page(string)

The system appears to most often work, but will occasionally choke out the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/will/google4.py", line 25, in <module>
    p = wikipedia.page(string)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wikipedia/wikipedia.py", line 276, in page
    return WikipediaPage(title, redirect=redirect, preload=preload)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wikipedia/wikipedia.py", line 299, in __init__
    self.__load(redirect=redirect, preload=preload)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/wikipedia/wikipedia.py", line 393, in __load
    raise DisambiguationError(getattr(self, 'title', page['title']), may_refer_to)
DisambiguationError: "The Scarf" may refer to: 
The Scarf (film)
The Scarf (opera)
Scarf (disambiguation)
Arthur Stewart King Scarf  

Is there anyway by which I can bypass this?

Zadoc

Answer 1

You could catch the DisambiguationError and chose one of these pages randomly.

try:
    p = wikipedia.page(string)
except wikipedia.DisambiguationError as e:
    s = random.choice(e.options)
    p = wikipedia.page(s)

see here: http://wikipedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

Osage

Answer 2

Better yet, use the tool at your disposal :

wikipedia.random(pages=1)

Get a list of random Wikipedia article titles.

Note

Random only gets articles from namespace 0, meaning no Category, User talk, or other meta-Wikipedia pages.

Keyword arguments:

    pages - the number of random pages returned (max of 10)

(from https://wikipedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/code.html#api)

Pursy

Answer 3

One obvious way would be to download a complete list of Wikipedia page names and use that instead of your word list. That would also be much kinder to Wikipedia's search engine which you don't need to get a random page (and besides, if you want a uniform random page, you mustn't use the search engine).

A less-good but perhaps easier fix would be for you to simply try/except the DisambiguationError and try again.

Millhon

Answer 4

Try following

p = wikipedia.page(string, auto_suggest=False, redirect=True, preload=False)

setting auto_suggest=False should resolve one of the issue.

Trihedron