Description

With the Wikipedia Metadata extension you can fetch metadata for your games directly from wikipedia. The following fields are supported:

  • Name
  • Release Date
  • Genres
  • Developers
  • Publishers
  • Features
  • Tags (arcade system, engine, director, producer, designer, programmer, artist, writer, composer) Each can be toggled!
  • Links
  • Series
  • Platform
  • Cover image
  • Critic Score (Metacritic and GameRankings as fallback)
  • Description (with option to leave out certain sections)

Download

You can download the extension directly in the add-​ons menu in Playnite or via the add-​on database on the Playnite website. The source code is available on GitHub.

FAQ

Why doesn’t the addon find a game/​finds something wrong on automatic metadata update, when it clearly is available on Wikipedia?

Since Wikipedia isn’t exclusive to video games and the names of games can be very general, searching for a game name can yield many results, that often don’t really fit. Therefore the addon tries to find a match in the search results, that’s most likely the wanted game. To do that it looks for the following in the search results in that order:

  • Game name with “(video game)” added
  • Game name itself
  • Game name without additions like “Special Edition” etc at the end with “(video game)” added
  • Game name without additions like “Special Edition” etc at the end

The search result also always has to have “video game” in its short description, to minimize results like “doom” not being a game at all. When matching it also removes all special characters and whitespaces from both sides, so for example “F.E.A.R.” will be matched with “fear”.

Unfortunately that can’t be 100% accurate, so sometimes a game won’t be found at all, for example when “video game” is missing from the description, or the addon will fetch another page, even if it’s no game at all, when it is named like the game and has “video game” in the description. Those cases can only be corrected by manual metadata updates, where you’ll be able to choose the right page from the search results yourself.

Why are the names of developer/​publisher/​programmer etc. different for games that are from the same developer/​publisher/​programmer etc.?

Since Wikipedia is a community driven encyclopedia where everyone can write and edit articles, there always will be differences, for example because one writer thinks the first name can be abbreviated, while the next one doesn’t etc. Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about that. You could help unify data like that by editing wikipedia articles yourself. An other option would be to use the Library Management addon for Playnite to rename and merge different data in tags, features, companies etc. For companies there’s also my own extension Company Companion to help with that.

Why are some fetched links named like the game/​not named after the website their linking to?
When a game has more than one video game infobox or critic score box only the first will be recognized.

This happens rarely for games that have remastered versions or where the reception is split between contemporary and reviews at release for older games. It’s a known issue that I maybe fix in the future.

Why isn’t the addon fetching some values that are clearly available for a game?

This could have two causes:

  1. There is a bug in the addon. In this case please open an issue for that on GitHub!
  2. The value doesn’t exist locally in the wikitext of the page, but is getting loaded from wikidata. You can check, if that is the case by editing the specific section on the wikipedia page. If the value reads “wikidata”, the addon can’t fetch it. It’s unlikely that I will fix this issue, because that most likely will be a huge amount of work for a rarely used feature. It’s more likely, that I or someone else will someday develop a wikidata metadata extension, that can be used instead.
Examples of known games with issues I can’t fix

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

The game has its platforms and release dates split between “original version” and “special edition”. Unfortunately instead of proper list templates the page uses a mix of tags and commas. Since commas can also be part of a name, I only split values by comma, if they aren’t already split by newline characters. Cases like that can only be fixed by editing the wiki page itself.