Wikipedia module in Python

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.

Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.
In this article, we will see how to use Python’s Wikipedia module 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

Getting Started

Getting the summary of any title

Summary of any title can be obtained by using summary method. 

Syntax : wikipedia.summary(title, sentences)
Argument :
Title of the topic 
Optional argument: setting number of lines in result.
Return : Returns the summary in string format. 

Code :

Python3

# importing the module
import wikipedia

# finding result for the search
# sentences = 2 refers to numbers of line
result = wikipedia.summary("India", sentences = 2)

# printing the result
print(result)

Output :

India (Hindi: Bh?rat), officially the Republic of India (Hindi: Bh?rat Ga?ar?jya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. 

Searching title and suggestions

Title and suggestions can be get by using search() method. 

Syntax : wikipedia.search(title, results)
Argument :
Title of the topic 
Optional argument : setting number of result.
Return : Returns the list of titles. 

Code :

Python3

# importing the module
import wikipedia

# getting suggestions
result = wikipedia.search("Geek", results = 5)

# printing the result
print(result)

Output :

['Geek', 'Geek!', 'Freaks and Geeks', 'The Geek', 'Geek show']

Getting Full Wikipedia Page Data

The page() method is used to get the contents, categories, coordinates, images, links and other metadata of a Wikipedia page.

Syntax : wikipedia.page(title)
Argument : Title of the topic.
Return : Return a WikipediaPage object. 

Code :

Python3

# importing the module
import wikipedia

# wikipedia page object is created
page_object = wikipedia.page("india")

# printing html of page_object
print(page_object.html)

# printing title
print(page_object.original_title)

# printing links on that page object
print(page_object.links[0:10])

Output :

“bound method WikipediaPage.html of “WikipediaPage ‘India'”> 
India 
[‘.in’, ’10th BRICS summit’, ’11th BRICS summit’, ’12th BRICS summit’, ’17th SAARC summit’, ’18th SAARC summit’, ‘1951 Asian Games’, ‘1957 Indian general election’, ‘1962 Indian general election’, ‘1982 Asian Games’] 

Changing language of Wikipedia page

The language can be changed to your native language if the page exists in your native language. Set_lang() method is used for the same. 

Syntax : wikipedia.set_lang(language)
Argument : prefix of the language like for arabic prefix is ar and so on.
Action performed : It converted the data into that language default language is english. 

Code :

Python3

# importing the module
import wikipedia

# setting language to hindi
wikipedia.set_lang("hi")

# printing the summary
print(wikipedia.summary("India"))

Output :