Question

Is there any package for R that allows querying Wikipedia (most probably using Mediawiki API) to get list of available articles relevant to such query, as well as import selected articles for text mining?

Answer 1

Use the RCurl package for retreiving info, and the XML or RJSONIO packages for parsing the response.

If you are behind a proxy, set your options.

opts <- list(
  proxy = "136.233.91.120", 
  proxyusername = "mydomain\\myusername", 
  proxypassword = 'whatever', 
  proxyport = 8080
)

Use the getForm function to access the API.

search_example <- getForm(
  "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php", 
  action  = "opensearch", 
  search  = "Te", 
  format  = "json",
  .opts   = opts
)

Parse the results.

fromJSON(rawToChar(search_example))