Getting information from a third party Wiki page

Question

In the project I am working on I need to access information from the website explainxkcd.com which gives the explanation of specific xkcd comics. The information I am looking for would be the explanation of the comic as a string. Explainxkcd is a site that runs using mediawiki, software that forms a template for the "wiki" feel. Mediawiki has an api that allows you to extract information from their websites and I have gone to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page trying to figure out how to use their API for this particular wiki site but to no avail. It seems that you can replace the "index.php" in a URL with api.php to use the API but when I try this for http://explainxkcd.com/9/api.php it doesn't seem to work. I guess my URL is wrong but I don't see any information on how to find the specific URL to use for Explainxkcd.com

QUESTION:

How can I access information from a third party wikipedia page in a Java program? This can be through the mediawiki api or some other solution. If you know a good way to find the URL that can be used with mediawiki that would be preferred. Just looking for a nudge in the right direction here.

Thanks

Answer 1

Using the same method, s/index.php/api.php/, I get a different result: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/api.php which seems to work. If a wiki is using pretty URLs (e.g. example.com/wiki/Main_Page), just click on edit, view source or history.

Yes, please use the API instead of screen-scraping. You can see a few existing Java libraries for that here.