Is it possible to get the image preview that an article uses?

[luni3359]

When you post a Wikipedia link in a site or program that supports "previews", usually a small description will show up, as well as a relevant image (if any). I thought that the first eleent in page.images would be the preview, but I was wrong. Aside from doing hacky stuff on page.html to retrieve the image preview, it doesn't seem to be possible to get it.

Is there any way to do it that I'm not aware of?

[barrust]

After looking a bit at the docs this morning I found a JSON Endpoint that would likely do what you are looking for. There are some portions of this project that attempts to parse the HTML page (logos, hatnotes, and parse_section_links)

The following code could be used to simulate what I think you are asking:

import requests

url = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Dog'
r = requests.get(url)
print(r.text)

If this is what you are looking for, then perhaps this could be added. It isn't exactly the same API and something would need to be done to check if it is available (since this library supports more than just Wikipedia!) but it could be useful.

Hope this helps!

[luni3359]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for! I'll be using this in the meantime.

As for your suggestion, I'm not sure if you think it'd be worth having this around, but I definitely think this should be. I'd love to contribute and make a PR myself, but I don't think I'm quite there yet in terms of skill.

[barrust]

So I have been thinking about this some more; do you think this makes more sense for a page or for the site? In other words, should this be a page property

# page property
from mediawiki import MediaWiki
wiki = MediaWiki()
page = wiki.page("Washington D.C.")
page.preview  # would be generated when called

Or would it be more useful if it was a function of the wiki site? Such as the following:

from mediawiki import MediaWiki
wiki = MediaWiki()
wiki.preview("Washington D.C.")
# probably some sort of tuple response

Thoughts?

[luni3359]

From my point of view it'd make more sense if the preview came from the page since that's where you can get a summary from as well. Or were you thinking about making wiki.preview feature a summary of the page, amongst other preview-like properties?

[barrust]

Sorry this has been on the back burner; but I pushed a branch that attempts to add this functionality into the system. In the end, I went with a slightly different method in the PR. I found an example of how it was accomplished prior to the json version and I felt it fit better with what we are doing in pymediawiki. Let me know if this provides what you are looking for!

[luni3359]

I don't really know how to test it, but from a quick read it looks good to me.