how can one find categories of a wikipedia page using just links of pages?

Question

Is there any API by which one can get all the categories of a page using the title or page id or url of that page? I tried searching on net but all I could find was getting dumps for specific categories. Any sort of help will be highly appreciated. Thanks

'I could find was getting dumps for specific categories' could you please tell where to find it? — Parag, Apr 03 '17 at 04:25

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited May 12 '16 at 10:04

The API you are looking for is here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php This is the media wiki API and has lots of documentation.

As said above you are looking for prop=categories so... ?format=xml&action=query&prop=categories&titles=Google for example

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&prop=categories&titles=Google

If you are looking to use this in a program it may be worth looking at the following Wikipedia page that has a series of classes and libraries for various languages to deal with handling the Wikipedia API e.t.c

Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot#Programming_languages_and_libraries

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 18 '12 at 01:18

8

MediaWiki (Wikipedia's software) has an API and you can indeed do a query to get the categories of a page. For example, the following returns the categories of the page Google in the English language Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&prop=categories&titles=Google

Note that not all categories are returned in one response. You'll see an element called query-continue which provides additional information on how the next query should be formulated which will give you more categories.

References:

edited Mar 18 '12 at 01:18

svick

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answered Mar 18 '12 at 01:10

Simeon Visser

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It's probably better to add `cllimit=max` to the query. That way, you have smaller number of queries and you might not even need more queries (I doubt any page has more than 500 categories). – svick Mar 18 '12 at 01:20

how can one find categories of a wikipedia page using just links of pages?

2 Answers2