How to get the list of links in a Wikipedia article in order of appearance

Question

I can get a list of links in a Wikipedia article using WikipediaData:

sortedLinks = WikipediaData["County", "LinksList"];
sortedLinks // Length

586

I need a list of links in order of their appearance in the article. I tried to write a function to extract the links from the article's code:

unsortedWikiLinks[title_String] := 
 DeleteDuplicates@Append[
   StringCases[WikipediaData[title, "ArticleWikicode"], 
    "[[" ~~ link : Except["]" | "|", _] .. :> 
     ToUpperCase[StringTake[link, 1]] <> StringDrop[link, 1]], 
  title]

However, many links are missed because "ArticleWikicode" does not parse the templates in the article.

unsortedLinks = unsortedWikiLinks["County"];
unsortedLinks // Length

244

The official Wikipedia API has an action to parse the templates, however I can't find this option in Mathematica's implementation.

How to get a list of links in order of their appearance with Mathematica?

Answer 1

Searke in the comments has a good idea. I found that one can get the article code with templates expanded by using query with revisions (there may be other ways). Here is an implementation of such an API query using URLExecute:

expandedWikitext[title_String] := Cases[
   URLExecute[
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php",
    {"format" -> "json",
     "action" -> "query",
     "titles" -> title,
     "prop" -> "revisions",
     "rvprop" -> "content",
     "rvexpandtemplates" -> "True"}], 
   ("*" -> text_String) :> text, Infinity
  ] // First

The above will return the code with templates expanded. Therefore, to construct an unsorted link function, do something like:

unsortedWikilinks[title_String] := DeleteDuplicates@Join[
   {title},
   Select[
    StringCases[
     expandedWikitext[title],
     "[[" ~~ link : Except["]" | "|" | "#", _] .. :> Capitalize@link
    ],
    ! StringContainsQ[#, ":"] &
   ]
  ]

(It's still a little kludgy, but it works).

unsortedLinks = unsortedWikiLinks["County"];
unsortedLinks // Length

586

ContainsExactly[unsortedlinks, sortedlinks]

True