User:BluePenguin18/Random article sampler

After downloading the packages rvest and xml2 using the install.packages() function, use this R code to generate a .csv file with the columns Name (containing the links to randomly sampled articles), Size (in bytes), and Date (of their creation). Use setwd("") to set the desired file path for saving this data. In the for loop, changing the 1:1000 parameter to 1:X sets how many articles will be randomly sampled.

# Enable required packages
library(rvest)
library(xml2)

# Function to get a random Wikipedia article
get_random_wiki_article <- function() {
  url <- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random"
  response <- read_html(url)
  random_article_url <- response %>% html_node('link[rel="canonical"]') %>% html_attr('href')
  return(random_article_url)
}

# Function to extract information from the article page
get_article_info <- function(article_url) {
  info_url <- paste0(article_url, "?action=info")
  response <- read_html(info_url)
  
  page_info <- list()
  page_info[["Name"]] <- article_url
  
  # Extract size info
  size_info <- response %>%
    html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="mw-pageinfo-length"]/td[2]') %>%
    html_text()
  if (length(size_info) > 0) {
    page_info[["Size"]] <- size_info[1] %>%
      stringr::str_trim()
  } else {
    page_info[["Size"]] <- NA
  }
  
  # Extract date info
  date_info <- response %>%
    html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="mw-pageinfo-firsttime"]/td[2]/a') %>%
    html_text()
  if (length(date_info) > 0) {
    page_info[["Date"]] <- date_info[1] %>%
      stringr::str_trim()
  } else {
    page_info[["Date"]] <- NA
  }
  
  return(page_info)
}

# Main function
main <- function() {
  article_info_list <- list()
  
  for (i in 1:1000) {
    random_article_url <- get_random_wiki_article()
    article_info <- get_article_info(random_article_url)
    article_info_list[[i]] <- article_info
  }
  
  article_info_df <- do.call(rbind, lapply(article_info_list, as.data.frame))
  
  write.csv(article_info_df, "Info.csv", row.names = FALSE)
}

# Run the main function
main()