Women of History

What it does

The applications queries Wikipedia's mediawiki API several times. It does this to find categories for the selected century, then the pageIDs of the women from those centuries, then data on those women from pageIDs, and finally gets their image from the page.

How I built it

The backend is done with node express, with the front end being node and pug. The queries are done with node-fetch.

Challenges I ran into

My first challenge was choosing a platform. I knew I would be writing many GET requests to this API, so I wanted to make that process as painless as possible. Node express has both a great package manager with packages that fulfill this requirement and the power to host the site locally that was great for testing. At the end of the project, I ran into the problem of choosing which picture from wikipedia to use on my site. Each article has many images, only some are relevant to the woman in question. In the end, I used the algorithm Levenshtein Distance to determine which image has the closest name to the article title to choose the image.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am confident in how I managed the data throughout the project, as it got pretty complicated in the middle of the queries.

What I learned

This is my first time going through a node project from scratch, as well as my first time coding with pug. I also learned about new algorithms for string matching, and many obscure women of history!

What's next for Women of History

Wikipedia has data for centuries before the 12th, but it is less organized so I couldn't use it. To continue, I would help out Wikipedia manage their ancient woman history for my benefit.

Built With

• mediawiki
• node.js
• pug