Wikipedia Airports

# Wikipedia Airports

Use Wikipedia as a **route discovery and sanity-check source** for airport destinations. This is especially useful when:

- an airport page has an **Airlines and destinations** section
- an airline's own city-pair marketing pages confirm service patterns
- flight search tools disagree about whether a route exists

Wikipedia is **not a booking source** and not a real-time schedule source. Use it to discover likely routes, then confirm them with airline or fare tools.

## Best Use Cases

- "What destinations does SAN serve?"
- "Does Southwest fly SAN -> EUG?"
- "What airports can I use for a late split return?"
- "Which airline serves this small airport nonstop?"

## Workflow

### 1. Resolve the airport page from an IATA code

Use Wikipedia search with the airport code plus the word `airport`.

```bash
curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=SAN+airport&format=json" \
  | jq '.query.search[0:5][] | {title}'
```

Usually the first result is the airport page, e.g. `San Diego International Airport`.

### 2. Fetch the page

Use the readable page HTML or the wikitext parse API.

```bash
curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=San_Diego_International_Airport&prop=wikitext&formatversion=2&format=json" \
  | jq -r '.parse.wikitext'
```

Or fetch the rendered page:

```bash
curl -Ls "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_International_Airport"
```

### 3. Look for route sections

Search for headings like:

- `Airlines and destinations`