wikipedia-reference-scraper

Wikipedia API wrapper for references

Motivation

I just graduated from Physiology department, University of Ibadan. I started typing my final year project some days before submission deadline. I made use of Wikipedia for my literature review because each page is supported with enough references. The next task was to copy and paste the references. This was a lot of work considering the fact that some pages has over 200 references and I wasn't working with just one page. I decided to make use of Wikipedia API wrappers but all the ones I checked didn't do what I needed. So I decided to write a simple script that scraped Wikipedia page.

Usage

Python Interactive Shell

>>> from wikipedia_reference_scraper import WikipediaReferenceScraper as wrs

>>> wrs().write_to_document('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#References', 'filename.docx')

Through the Command Line (with python-fire)

$ python wikipedia_reference_scraper.py write_to_document https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#References filename.docx

It pulls the references from a Wikipedia page and saves the references in a file.

Tools I Used

Requests

BeautifulSoup

python-fire