Wiki Search

A search page using the Wikipedia API

February 2017

Wikipedia Globe in hands. Photo by Lane Hartwell CC BY-SA 3.0

About Wiki-Search

There are basically two important things going on in this little app: two kinds of search requests are being prepared and sent to the Wikipedia API, and the results are being prepared and posted to the page without a page refresh. This is all going on with some pretty basic jQuery and AJAX.

The main challenge on this project was the documentation for the Wikipedia API, which is not particularly dev-friendly. There is a lot that can be done with Wikipedia's API, but there are dozens and dozens of pages of very dense docs with very small type and hundreds of links to wade through to figure out how to do any of it. I managed to find what I needed for this project, but I've hardly scratched the surface of what could be done with the Wikipedia API.

I'm also continuing to work to improve my JavaScript code. Because there are two buttons with very similar functions in the app—one which retrieves articles relevant to the user's search input, and another which grabs twelve random articles—there were lots of opportunities to DRY up the code by pulling code out of the button-click functions into helper functions. Doing so also improves the readability of the code a great deal.

Search WIKIPEDIA