Wiki[mp]edia
data sources &
the MediaWiki API
Brianna Laugher
for #melhack
November 2009

...

Wikipedia
13M articles total
3M+ articles in English
240+ languages
Simple English!

{{coord|37|48|49|S|144|57|
47|E|type:city_region:AU-VIC|
display=inline,title}}
stable.toolserver.org/geohack/
wiki.toolserver.org/view/GeoHack

{{Infobox Company
|name = Lonely Planet
|logo =
|type = [[United Kingdom|British]] [[Government-owned
company|government-owned]] (subsidiary of [[BBC Worldwide]])
|genre = [[Guide book|Travel guides]]
|foundation = 1972
|founder = Tony Wheeler<br />
Maureen Wheeler
|location_city = [[Footscray, Victoria]]
|location_country = [[Australia]]
|location =
|origins =
|key_people = Matt Goldberg
<small>(Global [[CEO]])</small>
|area_served = Worldwide
|industry = [[Multi media]]
|products = Travel [[guidebook,
digital applications, online travel
community]]
|services =

Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
Multilingual
5M+ files
“Self-created”, PD, Flickr
Predominantly photographs,
but also diagrams, maps, flags

Wiktionary
5M+ entries
170+ languages
13 languages > 100K entries
French biggest at 1.5M
(English second at 1.4M)

JavaScript Wiktionary lookup plugin for
third parties:
http://bawolff.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-
wiktionary-lookup-now-for.html
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Parsing

MediaWiki structure
 Users
 Logs
 Pages, subpages, talk pages
 Links, backlinks
 Templates
 Categories

MediaWiki markup
The only thing that completely
understands it is MediaWiki :(

Database dumps
XML
download.wikimedia.org
OR Amazon Public Data Sets
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Data_dumps

DBpedia
Community project extracting
structured data from Wikipedia and
making it available
Can download data sets or query them
online
Ontology++
e.g. dbpedia.org/page/Lonely_Planet

MediaWiki API
mediawiki.org/wiki/API
en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
Client libraries!

mwclient
Python library for
accessing MediaWiki
APIs

Toolserver
toolserver.org
Server for community-developed plugins,
addons, extensions, stats and hacks –
tools
Tools often explicitly implements implicit
editing community standards
(“community API”)

TemplateTiger
toolserver.org/~kolossos/templatetiger/
For a few dozen Wikipedia languages, &
Wikimedia Commons
Lets you query templates very much
like SQL

Thanks!
identi.ca/pfctdayelise
blaugher@wikimedia.org.au
Logos and screenshots
may be copyright
their respective owners
Slides are otherwise
© Brianna Laugher