On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Radhika Gaonkar <radhikag992@gmail.com> wrote:
    I am very new to the mediawiki-api . I am planning on using this to extract geo - information about places . I have been referring to this tutorial by scraper wiki https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2011/12/how-to-scrape-and-parse-wikipedia/ . Though I am not sure if I should be using this api or the offline dump

Don't scrape the live wiki. You may scrape a dump if you'd like.

Note that, if the only "geo information" you need are the coordinates, you can use the API to query them, like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=coordinates&titles=Washington,%20D.C.

and what is the difference between the two data sets ?

Mainly, the dumps are generated about once per month so they're not completely up-to-date.


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Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation