How to clone Wikipedia using Python to read articles directly on console?

Wikipedia a popular website known by every person in the globe for its countless information providing to the world be it any topic. This website helps many people to gain insights into certain things that they don’t know like learning something about history, polity, geography, mathematics, etc. It also helps students to get the requisite knowledge other than the textbook one and stay ahead in the class.

Since years Wikipedia has proven to be the most trusted website for accessing any kind of information and it will continue to dominate this sector. But what if we can clone Wikipedia with the help of coding??

Yes, it is possible, and that too with just a few lines of code. Trust me it is not a joke and I can prove it to you. The programming language that we are referring to is our very old pal Python. Python is a very interesting language when it comes to carrying out any typing of coding with just a few lines of code and with lesser syntaxes. The quality of Python is so enriched because of the inbuilt libraries and third-party libraries that do the work of execution for the developers. The library today we are referring to is called Wikipedia. This is a downloadable API of Wikipedia and can be used by Python developers to clone the website in their console. Let’s see how to use it and also get to know the installation steps:

Installation

Installation steps are explained taking into account that Python or Anaconda is already there in your system along with the pip installation. Also, you know how to create a virtual environment in Anaconda and start working on the same. Trivia: How to install and use Python on Windows 10 or 7 

Here I will be using Google Colaboratory for demonstration purposes but you can use your local system for the installation through the Command Prompt.

  • Open your Command Prompt and check whether Python, Anaconda, and Pip are there in your system or not. To do this just type Python, conda, and pip one by one. If there is no error then congrats you have all the prerequisites already there in the system.
  • After this just do
    pip install Wikipedia
  • This will download the Wikipedia library for you.
  • Now, you are ready to import it in the Python console using
    import Wikipedia

Working Steps

Once all the things are downloaded and imported within the Python console you just need to type 3 to 4 lines of code and the clone of Wikipedia will be working for you. I have shown a pictorial representation as to how to carry this process in Google Colaboratory.

text_input= input("Enter your input")
read_input= Wikipedia,page(text_input)
print(read_input.content)

wikipedia clone using python

Conclusion

By the above-mentioned things we can conclude that this is a very powerful tool to clone Wikipedia in a Python environment and developers must give it a try to grasp information about particular things. Also, if you are an explorative person who likes cool things then you should try this API at least and play around with the same. Go and avail of its benefits.