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For a project, I download some Wikipedia city pages like the page for my hometown Markdorf. As you can see on the Wikipedia page, the area of the city is displayed next to "Fläche" and the population is displayed next to "Einwohner".

Screenshot of the Wikipedia page of Markdorf

How can I get this data from the api? When I download the json version of the Wikipedia page of Markdorf the response of course contains "Fläche" and "Einwohner" but without value next to it. I expected to get this value like "Landkreis", that is returned as "key value pair" in the json version of the Wikipedia page: Landkreis = Bodenseekreis.

Fläche is listed as Fläche<ref name="Daten & Fakten">[http://markdorf.de/index.php?id=351 ''Daten & Fakten''] auf der Internetseite der Stadt Markdorf, abgerufen am 29.&nbsp;Mai 2015.</ref> | without any data. The referenced website http://markdorf.de/index.php?id=351 of course contains the information, but in no parsable way.

Screenshot of the Wikipedia api response for Markdorf

So: How can I access the information like Fläche and Einwohner using the Wikipedia api? Also Bevölkerungsdichte is not returned at all.

Thomas Kekeisen
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  • Possible duplicate of [How to extract information from a Wikipedia infobox?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33862336/how-to-extract-information-from-a-wikipedia-infobox) – Tgr Dec 08 '17 at 09:23

1 Answers1

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Tgr is right, you should use a structured data source instead of trying to parse the wikitext directly. You could use the wikidata query service to build a SPARQL query that returns the area and population based on the name of the town. That query might look like this: 

SELECT ?town ?townLabel ?area ?population WHERE {
  ?town ?label "Markdorf"@de.     # find the item labeled "Markdorf" in German
  ?town wdt:P2046 ?area.          # get the area(wdt:P2046) of that item
  ?town wdt:P1082 ?population.    # get the population(wdt:P1082) of that item
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "
[AUTO_LANGUAGE],de". }
}

Link to the query above

The results of that query can be accessed via the Wikidata JSON endpoint (the query is just encoded as the query parameter in that URL).

Jan Drewniak
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  • Thanks. This is working very well for the most of the values. Do you know how to query the license plate or the "Stadtgliederung"? The license plate exists as parameter, but its empty in the response. I think this happens because the city has no own license plate since it belongs to the next bigger city. – Thomas Kekeisen Dec 28 '17 at 20:56
  • Ok, figured it out. Here is the query for anyone that comes here from google: https://pastebin.com/2WEWGdmn – Thomas Kekeisen Dec 28 '17 at 21:49