How to get all article pages under a Wikipedia Category and its sub-categories?

Question

I want to get all the articles names under a category and its sub-categories.

Options I\'m aware of:

1. Using the Wikipedia API. Does it have such an opt

Answer 1

Note that Wikipedia's categorization system is not a tree, or even an acyclic graph. It is quite possible that by continually following subcategory links you will eventually wind up back where you started.

If you are going to be making many such queries, you would be best served by downloading a database dump. If this will be an infrequent thing and will only be dealing with small categories, you could probably get away with making repeated queries to list=categorymembers.

incategory:"music" does not appear to do subcategory searching.

Answer 2

The following resource will help you to download all pages from the category and all its subcategories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CatScan

There is also an API available here:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Categorymembers

Answer 3

You can do this through the following two API methods:

For articles pages for this category

YOUR_URL/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Music

For get subcategories:

YOUR_URL/api.php?action=query&format=json&list=categorymembers&cmtype=subcat&cmtitle=Category:Music

You can get more info on Mediawiki API