gabrielmoreira wikipedia
Answer Wikipedia questions from the RIGHT VERSION of the page. The live page is wrong for any question that says "as of 2020", "the latest 2022 version", "before December 2022", or similar — fetch a historical revision instead.
Point-in-time revisions (oldid)
Every revision has a permanent URL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=<Title>&oldid=<REVISION_ID>
To find the last revision before a cutoff date, use the revisions API
(os.web.fetch the URL; it returns JSON):
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=<Title>&rvlimit=1&rvdir=older&rvstart=<ISO8601>&rvprop=ids|timestamp&format=json
rvstart = the cutoff, e.g. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z for "the latest 2022
version". Read query.pages.<id>.revisions[0].revid, then fetch the oldid URL
above with that revid.
Full history
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=<Title>&action=history— human view- The API above with
rvlimit=20lists recent revisions with timestamps.
Other patterns
- Underscores in titles:
Mercedes_Sosa, not spaces. - Discography/albums questions: the answer is usually a table or section on the
artist page or a dedicated
<Artist>_discographypage — check both. - Featured-article promotion questions: the article's talk page and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/<Title>record who nominated it and when. - If a fetched page is long, the full text is saved to disk by the fetch tool —
search it with
os.fs.grep { pattern, path }rather than re-fetching.