--- title: Using wikipedia as a movie database | daily.dev description: A live coding session building a personal movie tracker that uses Wikipedia as a backend instead of restrictive movie APIs like TMDB or OMDB. The developer... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/using-wikipedia-as-a-movie-database-i2o1kjwna twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Using wikipedia as a movie database | daily.dev og:description: A live coding session building a personal movie tracker that uses Wikipedia as a backend instead of restrictive movie APIs like TMDB or OMDB. The developer... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/using-wikipedia-as-a-movie-database-i2o1kjwna og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/i2O1kJwNa.png og:image:alt: Using wikipedia as a movie database og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Using wikipedia as a movie database **[sphaerophoria](https://daily.dev/sources/sphaerophoria)** · 123 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A live coding session building a personal movie tracker that uses Wikipedia as a backend instead of restrictive movie APIs like TMDB or OMDB. The developer writes Zig code to fetch Wikipedia pages via the MediaWiki API, parse Wikipedia markup (wikitext) to extract structured data from film infoboxes, implement a local file-based cache to avoid hammering the API, and resolve movie poster image URLs through the Wikimedia file API. The session covers HTTP requests in Zig, decompression, JSON parsing, custom lexer/buffer utilities for wikitext parsing, and filesystem caching with URL-safe path encoding. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why can't I use the TMDB API to permanently store movie data in my own database? TMDB's API terms of use prohibit caching any information obtained through the API for longer than 6 months, which conflicts with building a personal database meant to store movie titles, release years, and posters indefinitely. This restriction, combined with most free movie APIs being similarly restrictive, is why building a scraper against Wikipedia's own API was chosen as an alternative backend. _Developers weighing API licensing constraints against self-hosted data ownership can compare approaches like this on daily.dev._ ### How is data structured inside a Wikipedia film infobox for parsing? A Wikipedia film infobox is written in wikitext starting with a double-brace tag like {{Infobox film}}, followed by pipe-separated key-value fields such as director, writer, and studio, where values can themselves contain nested double-brace templates (like {{Plainlist}} or {{Film date}}) that must be tracked with a tag stack to correctly find matching closing braces without prematurely truncating a value. _Anyone parsing Wikipedia markup for a side project can find similar wikitext parsing walkthroughs on daily.dev._ ### How do you get the actual image URL for a Wikipedia infobox poster instead of just the filename? The infobox only lists a bare filename like Furious_7_poster.jpeg, so retrieving the real image URL requires a second request to the Wikimedia file metadata API endpoint (v1/file/{title}), which returns JSON containing a preferred URL field pointing to the actual hosted image, rather than the file being directly resolvable from the infobox data alone. _Developers building media-fetching tools against Wikimedia's API can find practical integration notes like this on daily.dev._ --- Tags: [#zig](https://daily.dev/tags/zig) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/using-wikipedia-as-a-movie-database-i2o1kjwna) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Using wikipedia as a movie database","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/using-wikipedia-as-a-movie-database-i2o1kjwna","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/using-wikipedia-as-a-movie-database-i2o1kjwna"},"datePublished":"2026-07-16T22:58:44.871Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T07:26:06.005Z","description":"A live coding session building a personal movie tracker that uses Wikipedia as a backend instead of restrictive movie APIs like TMDB or OMDB. 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