How to get plain text out of Wikipedia

Question

I'd like to write a script that gets the Wikipedia description section only. That is, when I say

/wiki bla bla bla 

it will go to the Wikipedia page for bla bla bla, get the following, and return it to the chatroom:

"Bla Bla Bla" is the name of a song made by Gigi D'Agostino. He described this song as "a piece I wrote thinking of all the people who talk and talk without saying anything". The prominent but nonsensical vocal samples are taken from UK band Stretch's song "Why Did You Do It"

How can I do this?

Answer 1

Here are a few different possible approaches; use whichever works for you. All my code examples below use requests for HTTP requests to the API; you can install requests with pip install requests if you have Pip. They also all use the Mediawiki API, and two use the query endpoint; follow those links if you want documentation.

1. Get a plain text representation of either the entire page or the page "extract" straight from the API with the extracts prop

Note that this approach only works on MediaWiki sites with the TextExtracts extension. This notably includes Wikipedia, but not some smaller Mediawiki sites like, say, http://www.wikia.com/

You want to hit a URL like

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&titles=Bla_Bla_Bla&prop=extracts&exintro&explaintext

Breaking that down, we've got the following parameters in there (documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TextExtracts#query+extracts):

• action=query, format=json, and title=Bla_Bla_Bla are all standard MediaWiki API parameters
• prop=extracts makes us use the TextExtracts extension
• exintro limits the response to content before the first section heading
• explaintext makes the extract in the response be plain text instead of HTML

Then parse the JSON response and extract the extract:

>>> import requests >>> response = requests.get( ...     'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php', ...     params={ ...         'action': 'query', ...         'format': 'json', ...         'titles': 'Bla Bla Bla', ...         'prop': 'extracts', ...         'exintro': True, ...         'explaintext': True, ...     } ... ).json() >>> page = next(iter(response['query']['pages'].values())) >>> print(page['extract']) "Bla Bla Bla" is the title of a song written and recorded by Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino. It was released in May 1999 as the third single from the album, L'Amour Toujours. It reached number 3 in Austria and number 15 in France. This song can also be heard in an added remixed mashup with L'Amour Toujours (I'll Fly With You) in its US radio version. 

2. Get the full HTML of the page using the parse endpoint, parse it, and extract the first paragraph

MediaWiki has a parse endpoint that you can hit with a URL like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Bla_Bla_Bla to get the HTML of a page. You can then parse it with an HTML parser like lxml (install it first with pip install lxml) to extract the first paragraph.

For example:

>>> import requests >>> from lxml import html >>> response = requests.get( ...     'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php', ...     params={ ...         'action': 'parse', ...         'page': 'Bla Bla Bla', ...         'format': 'json', ...     } ... ).json() >>> raw_html = response['parse']['text']['*'] >>> document = html.document_fromstring(raw_html) >>> first_p = document.xpath('//p')[0] >>> intro_text = first_p.text_content() >>> print(intro_text) "Bla Bla Bla" is the title of a song written and recorded by Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino. It was released in May 1999 as the third single from the album, L'Amour Toujours. It reached number 3 in Austria and number 15 in France. This song can also be heard in an added remixed mashup with L'Amour Toujours (I'll Fly With You) in its US radio version. 

3. Parse wikitext yourself

You can use the query API to get the page's wikitext, parse it using mwparserfromhell (install it first using pip install mwparserfromhell), then reduce it down to human-readable text using strip_code. strip_code doesn't work perfectly at the time of writing (as shown clearly in the example below) but will hopefully improve.

>>> import requests >>> import mwparserfromhell >>> response = requests.get( ...     'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php', ...     params={ ...         'action': 'query', ...         'format': 'json', ...         'titles': 'Bla Bla Bla', ...         'prop': 'revisions', ...         'rvprop': 'content', ...     } ... ).json() >>> page = next(iter(response['query']['pages'].values())) >>> wikicode = page['revisions'][0]['*'] >>> parsed_wikicode = mwparserfromhell.parse(wikicode) >>> print(parsed_wikicode.strip_code()) {{dablink|For Ke$ha's song, see Blah Blah Blah (song). For other uses, see Blah (disambiguation)}}  "Bla Bla Bla" is the title of a song written and recorded by Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino. It was released in May 1999 as the third single from the album, L'Amour Toujours. It reached number 3 in Austria and number 15 in France. This song can also be heard in an added remixed mashup with L'Amour Toujours (I'll Fly With You) in its US radio version.  Background and writing He described this song as "a piece I wrote thinking of all the people who talk and talk without saying anything". The prominent but nonsensical vocal samples are taken from UK band Stretch's song "Why Did You Do It"''.  Music video The song also featured a popular music video in the style of La Linea. The music video shows a man with a floating head and no arms walking toward what appears to be a shark that multiplies itself and can change direction. This style was also used in "The Riddle", another song by Gigi D'Agostino, originally from British singer Nik Kershaw.  Chart performance Chart (1999-00)PeakpositionIreland (IRMA)Search for Irish peaks23  References  External links   Category:1999 singles Category:Gigi D'Agostino songs Category:1999 songs Category:ZYX Music singles Category:Songs written by Gigi D'Agostino 

Answer 2

Use the MediaWiki API, which runs on Wikipedia. You will have to do some parsing of the data yourself.

For instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=json&&titles=Bla%20Bla%20Bla

means

fetch (action=query) the content (rvprop=content) of the most recent revision of Main Page (title=Main%20Page) in JSON format (format=json).

You will probably want to search for the query and use the first result, to handle spelling errors and the like.