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wikichanges

Note: it is now possible to get the Wikipedia update stream easily from Wikipedia's EventStreams. I think there's so much tooling around the old IRC update channels that they haven't been turned off yet, but maybe someday. If you are building something new you should really look at EventStreams!

wikichanges is a node.js library for getting an edit stream from the 37 major language Wikipedias. The Wikipedia MediaWiki installations are configured to log changes in specific IRC channels. wikichanges joins all these channels, listens for updates, which it then parses, and sends as JavaScript objects to a callback of your choosing. Each change will look something like:

{ 
  channel: '#en.wikipedia',
  wikipedia: 'English Wikipedia',
  page: 'Persuasion (novel)',
  pageUrl: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion_(novel)',
  url: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=498770193&oldid=497895763',
  delta: -13,
  comment: '/* Main characters */',
  wikipediaUrl: 'http://en.wikipedia.org',
  user: '108.49.244.224',
  userUrl: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:108.49.244.224',
  unpatrolled: false,
  newPage: false,
  robot: false,
  anonymous: true,
  namespace: 'Article'
  flag: '',
}

Install

If you aren't on Ubuntu, try to do the equivalent to get your node.js environment set up, and run a test program:

% sudo apt-get install nodejs
% npm install wikichanges

Usage

Here's a simple example of listening on all Wikipedia channels and printing out the page that changed along with its URL.

var wikichanges = require("wikichanges");

var w = new wikichanges.WikiChanges();
w.listen(function(change) {
  console.log(change.page + " " + change.pageUrl)
});

If you would like to listen only on a particular channel or channels create the wikichanges object like this:

var w = new wikichanges.WikiChanges({wikipedias: ["#fr.wikipedia", "#de.wikipedia"]});

By default wikichanges picks a IRC nick of wikichanges-{hostname} where hostname is the hostname for the computer that your program is running. If you would like to control the IRC nick used by your program use the ircNickname option:

var w = new wikichanges.WikiChanges({ircNickname: 'super-awesome'})

License

  • CC0