Edward Andrew Robinson » api http://www.earobinson.org “Brilliant people simplify things, and mediocre people complicate things.” — Unknown Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:12:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Mapping Wikipedia http://www.earobinson.org/2008/04/27/mapping-wikipedia/ http://www.earobinson.org/2008/04/27/mapping-wikipedia/#comments Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:04:23 +0000 Edward Andrew Robinson http://www.earobinson.org/?p=106 I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.

Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py


And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.

More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:

  1. Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
  2. Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
  3. It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)

If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.

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