After months of digging into generative art in JS and handling the recent Ruby version, I am now returning to my Python open data project—WikipediaQ

Wikipedia and irregular data: how much can you fetch in one expression?

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2022-01-27 16:30:03

After months of digging into generative art in JS and handling the recent Ruby version, I am now returning to my Python open data project—WikipediaQL.

It is still in the early/experimental stages, and the last few months of writing gave me the idea that for my mindset, it would be much easier to write about the project and ideas behind it simultaneously with developing.

Previous months of work on WikipediaQL were quite chaotic: I’ve tried to build some feature I imagined should be useful, spent several weeks on it, then it was ready, then I started to write an article… And typically, found out that trying to explain the new idea exposes it lacking some important nuance or being overcooked.

I’ve explained the set of ideas behind WikipediaQL in the previous write-up (“Taming the irregular”). In short, I am trying to build “what it says on the tin”: a query language to fetch data from Wikipedia (and then, other MediaWiki-based sites). Like this:

There is, though, one important angle of view on this work I haven’t investigated yet: I am trying to design a way to fetch data in one expressive phrase.