Question

Is it possible to query the Wikipedia API for articles that contain a specific template? The documentation does not describe any action that would filter search results to pages that contain a template. Specifically, I am after pages that contain Template:Persondata. After that, I am hoping to be able to retrieve just that specific template in order to populate genealogy data for the openancestry.org project.

The query below shows that the Albert Einstein page contains the Persondata Template, but it doesn’t return the contents of the template, and I don’t know how to get a list of page titles that contain the template.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=templates&titles=Albert%20Einstein&tlcontinue=736|10|ParmPart

Returns:

<api>
 <query>
  <pages>
   <page pageid="736" ns="0" title="Albert Einstein">
    <templates>
     ...
     <tl ns="10" title="Template:Persondata"/>
     ...
    </templates>
   </page>
  </pages>
 </query>
 <query-continue>
  <templates tlcontinue="736|10|Reflist"/>
 </query-continue>
</api>

I suspect that I can’t get what I need from the API, but I’m hoping I’m wrong and that someone has already blazed a trail down this path.

Answer 1

You can use the embeddedin query to find all pages that include the template:

curl 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=embeddedin&eititle=Template:Persondata&eilimit=5&format=xml'

Which gets you:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <query>
    <embeddedin>
      <ei pageid="307" ns="0" title="Abraham Lincoln" />
      <ei pageid="308" ns="0" title="Aristotle" />
      <ei pageid="339" ns="0" title="Ayn Rand" />
      <ei pageid="340" ns="0" title="Alain Connes" />
      <ei pageid="344" ns="0" title="Allan Dwan" />
    </embeddedin>
  </query>
  <query-continue>
    <embeddedin eicontinue="10|Persondata|595" />
  </query-continue>
</api>

See full docs at mediawiki.org.

Edit Use embeddedin query instead of backlinks (which doesn’t cover template inclusions)