Wikipedia disambiguation error

Question

I have recently been using the wikipedia module to determine a random wikipedia page.

I have been doing this with a very large list of words, and the random.choice()

Answer 1

You could catch the DisambiguationError and chose one of these pages randomly.

try:
    p = wikipedia.page(string)
except wikipedia.DisambiguationError as e:
    s = random.choice(e.options)
    p = wikipedia.page(s)

see here: http://wikipedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

Answer 2

Better yet, use the tool at your disposal :

wikipedia.random(pages=1)

Get a list of random Wikipedia article titles.

Note

Random only gets articles from namespace 0, meaning no Category, User talk, or other meta-Wikipedia pages.

Keyword arguments:

    pages - the number of random pages returned (max of 10)

(from https://wikipedia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/code.html#api)

Answer 3

One obvious way would be to download a complete list of Wikipedia page names and use that instead of your word list. That would also be much kinder to Wikipedia's search engine which you don't need to get a random page (and besides, if you want a uniform random page, you mustn't use the search engine).

A less-good but perhaps easier fix would be for you to simply try/except the DisambiguationError and try again.