Question

Looking at the wikimedia api documentation it only talks of searching for images who’s titles begin with the search term. I’d like to have a more general search.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Allimages

This API document does state that you can query the images like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allimages&aiprop=url&format=xml&ailimit=10&aifrom=Albert

However the aifrom= parameter seems kind of limited. Is there an alternative parameter to use for wildcard searches?

Answer 1

I don’t think there is. You can use table indexes with wildcards at the end of words, but cannot otherwise, so such wildcard searches would lead to preformance problems on sites the size of Wikipedia.