Getting Data From the Wikipedia API Using jQuery
Where would we be without Wikipedia? It’s hard to believe how we survived without this icon of the Internet. A novel idea of being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, it’s always kinda interesting how you can look up an article about one thing and then end up somewhere completely different as you jump from article to article by clicking through its link-heavy content. But more important than that, Wikipedia is the authoritative mediating source of arbitration in all Internet arguments where the combatants usually don’t have anything other than extremely biased and inflammatory blogs as source material at hand and are too lazy to do their own research using actual respectable academic sources.
I’ve even heard that this spills over into the “real world.” Wikipedia has reported that it sees a huge spike in traffic coming in on mobile devices on Friday and Saturday nights and the underlying cause of this is believed to be attempts to settle disagreements than break out from drunken arguments in bars.
So, all things considered Wikipedia usually has a good base on information just about any subject under the sun. And it got me thinking that a lot of websites and applications could benefit greatly from having an easy way to pull data from Wikipedia and use it to populate content. Fortunately, Wikipedia is built on some software that does provide an API for doing this. I remember seeing the super-slick Google Chrome experiment 100,000 stars put out by the folks at Google used Wikipedia excerpts as a brief description of each star. So I thought I’d look into the process of pulling data from Wikipedia using JavaScript and write it down because I figure someone else would find it useful at some point. Because other wikis are built upon the same foundation as Wikipedia, itself, this is not limited to getting data from Wikipedia alone. You can query other Wikis as well.
