Wikipedia Biography Creator

Wikipedia Biography Creator is a .NET console application that looks for candidates for which to create a biography article on Wikipedia using obituaries as sources. To achieve that it cross-references obituary archives from The New York Times and The Guardian, applies fuzzy matching to identify overlapping mentions of deceased individuals, and checks whether those individuals already have a biography article on Wikipedia.
Results are displayed per month in a clean console UI. Candidates need to checked for existence on Wikipedia manually before creating the actual page.

✨ Features

• Fetches obituaries from:
  • 📰 The Guardian API
  • 🗞️ The New York Times API
• Applies fuzzy text matching to match obituary subjects across sources.
• Handles ambiguities with a Disambiguation Resolver.
• Queries Wikipedia to check for existing biographies.
• Displays results per month in a structured console UI.
• Modular architecture with clear separation of concerns (services, models, interfaces).

🧱 Prerequisites

Before building the project, make sure you have:

• .NET 8.0 SDK or later
• Internet connection (the app queries live APIs)
• API keys for:
  • The Guardian Open Platform
  • The New York Times Archive API

⚙️ Configuration

Create or edit the file appsettings.json in the project root.

Here’s an example configuration:

{
  "GuardianApi": {
    "ApiKey": "YOUR_GUARDIAN_API_KEY",
    "BaseUrl": "https://content.guardianapis.com"
  },
  "NYTimesApi": {
    "ApiKey": "YOUR_NYTIMES_API_KEY",
    "BaseUrl": "https://api.nytimes.com"
  },
  "WikipediaApi": {
    "BaseUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php"
  },
  "Fuzzy search": {
    "Score threshold": 85
  }
}

💡 Note:

• API keys are required for The Guardian and The New York Times services.
• The Wikipedia API is public and does not require a key.
• The Fuzzy search score threshold determines when names of deceased in the two sources are matched.

🏗️ Building and running the Application

From the project root: dotnet build
This will restore dependencies and compile the project.

To run it: dotnet run
The UI should explain itself.

🪪 License

MIT License © 2025