getwiki is the Wikipedia api wrapper for R that you definitely knew you needed. The purpose of this package is to import Wikipedia articles into R, quickly and easily. getwiki will return articles in a format that plays nice with tidytext, simplifying your NLP workflow. Previously, the easiest way to import the text of a Wikipedia article was to highlight everything and then copy paste it into a character vector.
This has the obvious disadvantages of formatting issues and being a manual, tedious process. With getwiki you can simply access Wikipedia using Wikipedia's API.
Starting with getwiki is easy. First install it from github using devtools and then load it into your library.
# download from github
devtools::install_github("corydonbaylor/getwiki")
# load into R
library(getwiki)
The first function, get_wiki, will return the matched Wikipedia article based on titles. So if you were to search for France then the function would return the Wikipedia article for France as a string.
# will return a character string with the contents of the wikipedia page on France.
get_wiki("France")
If you want to search for more than one article at a time you can! get_wiki() will return multiple articles in a data.frame with one column being the title of the article and the other being the content of the article. Just put the needed items in a character vector.
# will return a character string with the contents of the wikipedia page on France.
get_wiki(c("France", "United States"))
get_wiki will try to clean out all html tags returned by the API using regex. However, this can be unreliable as there is no simple regex pattern to only match html tags. If you would like to skip this, set clean = FALSE.
# this will keep the html tags from the API results
get_wiki("France", clean = FALSE)
Sometimes you may not be exactly sure what article you are looking for. search_wiki will return the top twenty matching articles based on a search term. So for example if you were to search for United States, you will retun a data.frame with a column for the returned titles and a column with the content of those articles.
# this will keep the html tags from the API results
search_wiki("United States")
Note that the content article only has the text of the first paragraph of the article. If you want to return the full text of those articles you will need to use get_wiki. This can be easily accomplished in two lines.
# this will keep the html tags from the API results
us = search_wiki("United States")
# this will return the full text of the wikipedia articles
big_us = get_wiki(us$titles)
If you would just like to pull in a random article, you can do that as well with random_wiki. This function works exactly the same as get_wiki except you cannot specify the article, and you can only return one article at a time.
# returns a random wikipedia article
random_wiki()
If you want to find how often a particular page has been viewed, you can use trend_wiki. It will return a data.frame with the page views for the last sixty days.
# returns a random wikipedia article
trend_wiki("France")