This is a simple plugin which allows you to grab images stored in Wikipedia (or better WikiCommons). It does not do scraping but uses a subset of the MediaWiki API.

• open-uri
• nokogiri
• cgi

./script/plugin install git://github.com/fuxowitsch/WikiImage.git

images=WikiImage.new("Douglas Adams").getImages

This will return an array of hashes with the following keys:

:url            Link to the image
:size           Size of the image in bytes
:descriptionurl Link to the description page on Wikipedia 
:width          Width in Pixels
:height         Height in Pixels
:user           The user who uploaded the image and probably owns it (copyright holder might be different)
:timestamp      Last modified
:comment        Wikipedia comment info in wiki text

images=WikiImage.new("Douglas Adams").getImages(:globalusage).first

This returns the global usage on all WikiPedia pages for the first image found:

:title          The page title
:url            The wiki url
:wiki           The wikipedia domain (e.g. de.wikipedia.org)

You can also access the imagelist as represented in Wikipedia:

list = WikiImage.new("Fred Flintstone").imagelist

If you did use getImages on both properties you can access the stockpile which gives you a hash on all data:

obj=WikiImage.new("Fred Astaire")
obj.getImages(:imageinfo)
obj.getImages(:globalusage)
everything=obj.stockpile

everything will then contain - well everything ;)

Always show a link to the license (:descriptionurl) and name the Author (:user)

Assuming you have rspec installed you can run the tests within the plugin directory by invoking rake.

• Filter images only. Currently also other media content is returned
• Get more description content from the actual wiki page
• Ideas?

Copyright (c) 2010 Bernhard Fuchs, released under the MIT license