Download URL for Wikipedia Images

Wikipedia pages usually have a thumbnail associated with them. This function uses an API offered by Wikipedia to extract the URL of that image.

Usage

get_wikipedia_image_urls(
  taxa,
  contact = NULL,
  size = 120,
  lang = "de",
  progress = TRUE
)

Arguments

taxa

character with the taxa for which an image URL should be obtained.

contact

contact data to pass on in the user agent of the API call to Wikipedia. Starting in 2026, there is a strict rate limit on API calls per minute for calls without contact data. There are two possible ways to pass contact data:

• a string containing an email address.

• a list that specifies an existing Wikipedia account. You need to specify two named elements: "lang" giving the language code of the Wikipedia where the account is registered and "user" giving the user name. Example: list(lang = "de", user = "James Bond").

See the User Agent Policy for more information.

size

integer giving the width of the image in pixel.

lang

language of the Wikipedia page to use. Available languages include "de" (German, the default), "en" (English), "fr" (French), and "es" (Spanish). See List of Wikipedias for a full list of available languages.

progress

Whether to show a progress bar.

Value

a character vector with URLs. For taxa where no thumbnail was found, the function returns NA.