Getting Started with Python’s Wikipedia API
Introduction
In this article, we will be using the Wikipedia API to retrieve data from Wikipedia. Data scraping has seen a rapid surge owing to the increasing use of data analytics and machine learning tools. The Internet is the single largest source of information, and therefore it is important to know how to fetch data from various sources. And with Wikipedia being one of the largest and most popular sources for information on the Internet, this is a natural place to start.
In this article, we will see how to use Python’s Wikipedia API to fetch a variety of information from the Wikipedia website.
Installation
In order to extract data from Wikipedia, we must first install the Python Wikipedia library, which wraps the official Wikipedia API. This can be done by entering the command below in your command prompt or terminal:
$ pip install wikipedia
Once the installation is done, we can use the Wikipedia API in Python to extract information from Wikipedia. In order to call the methods of the Wikipedia module in Python, we need to import it using the following command.
import wikipedia