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Many tutorials on the Web will the you to install Pythonwrapper APIs such as mkwikidata or pywikibot, but I always prefer to use requests to fetch the API endpoint myself as the learning curve is a lot smaller and it does not rely on libraries that install lots of things that you don’t need.

In this tutorial, you will learn to use Python fetch some of the information that I deem Important within Wikidata, using its API.

The Wikidata API is an Open API that allows you to query its data by fetching the following endpoint. To this endpoint, parameters can be added to the request to tell which data is required and in which format. Parameters are all the element after the question mark (?) and separated by ands (&) in the URL. For example, if you open the following URL...

The Wikidata action parameter is used to define what action that you want the API to do. The action that you chose will influence the way the data can be queried. The two main actions covered in this tutorial are: 1. wbsearchentities 2. wbgetentities But there are many more possible actions…

The wbsearchentities searches for entities using labels and aliases. This helps you to discover the entity ID using free text. For example, using the search term “Google” to find that it’s entity ID is Q9366.

The wbgetentities action helps you get the data for the Wikibase entities for which you know the ID. This helps you query all the data available for a given wikidata ID. The wikidata ID is either found with the Wbsearchentities API, or in the URL or the title of the Wikidata page.

Now, I will showcase an example of how one can query the important data from the Wikidata API using Python by attempting to get info from the Google LLCwikidata page.

The wbgetentities will allow you to fetch data fro one or multiple entities. When fetching multiple item, separate each item with the (|) symbol. Here I will fetch the Google LLC ID that we had from the previous response. Output:

Now, to parse this response require some investigation work. You can explore the JSON response by using methods such as: One thing to bear in mind is that the claims key lists elements using the P123format. Here is an example: This ID is the Property ID that you can view by hovering over individual links in Wikidata. By selecting the Property ID, y...