How to access Wikipedia from R?

Question

Is there any package for R that allows querying Wikipedia (most probably using Mediawiki API) to get list of available articles relevant to such query, as well as import selected articles for text mining?

Flexure

You might find the following useful: ragtag.info/2011/feb/10/processing-every-wikipedia-article – Sealer

Answer 1

Use the RCurl package for retreiving info, and the XML or RJSONIO packages for parsing the response.

If you are behind a proxy, set your options.

opts <- list(
  proxy = "136.233.91.120", 
  proxyusername = "mydomain\\myusername", 
  proxypassword = 'whatever', 
  proxyport = 8080
)

Use the getForm function to access the API.

search_example <- getForm(
  "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php", 
  action  = "opensearch", 
  search  = "Te", 
  format  = "json",
  .opts   = opts
)

Parse the results.

fromJSON(rawToChar(search_example))

Glassine

I'm having problems with using this for some search terms, but I suspect it is an issue with the network I'm on. I need volunteers to check the sample code with different strings in the search parameter. – Glassine

Answer 2

There is WikipediR, 'A MediaWiki API wrapper in R'

library(devtools)
install_github("Ironholds/WikipediR")
library(WikipediR)

It includes these functions:

ls("package:WikipediR")
 [1] "wiki_catpages"      "wiki_con"           "wiki_diff"          "wiki_page"         
 [5] "wiki_pagecats"      "wiki_recentchanges" "wiki_revision"      "wiki_timestamp"    
 [9] "wiki_usercontribs"  "wiki_userinfo"  

Here it is in use, getting the contribution details and user details for a bunch of users:

library(RCurl)
library(XML)

# scrape page to get usernames of users with highest numbers of edits
top_editors_page <- "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits"
top_editors_table <- readHTMLTable(top_editors_page)
very_top_editors <- as.character(top_editors_table[[3]][1:5,]$User)

# setup connection to wikimedia project 
con <- wiki_con("en", project = c("wikipedia"))

# connect to API and get last 50 edits per user
user_data <- lapply(very_top_editors,  function(i) wiki_usercontribs(con, i) )
# and get information about the users (registration date, gender, editcount, etc)
user_info <- lapply(very_top_editors,  function(i) wiki_userinfo(con, i) )

Vishnu

Answer 3

A new great possibility is the wikifacts package (on CRAN):

library(wikifacts)
wiki_define('R (programming language)')
## R (programming language) 
## "R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, data mining surveys, and studies of scholarly literature databases show substantial increases in popularity; as of April 2021, R ranks 16th in the TIOBE index, a measure of popularity of programming languages.The official R software environment is a GNU package.\nIt is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R itself (thus, it is partially self-hosting) and is freely available under the GNU General Public License. Pre-compiled executables are provided for various operating systems."

Walli