Wikimedia Enterprise API Documentation

Welcome to the Wikimedia Enterprise API Documentation and Reference guide. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a suite of APIs designed for high-volume access to Wikimedia project data; including Wikipedia and many others. Regardless of which of our APIs you obtain data from, the response format is the same; you don’t need to build multiple parsers. Our binary API endpoints (Snapshot and Realtime Batch) return NDJSON and our HTTP API endpoints default to JSON but can also return NDJSON with a simple header.

Here are a couple examples of what you can do with Wikimedia Enterprise APIs

  • Download an entire Wikimedia project (HTML Database Dump)
    • Call the Snapshot API to receive a tarball (.tar.gz) containing every single article in a specific project; example being English Wikipedia or German Wiktionary.
  • Request the latest public version of a single article:
    • Query the On-demand API by article name, like “Albert_Einstein” or “SpaceX”, to receive the most recent article version in all projects. You can also use filters for language and/or project of choice.
  • Stream real-time updates (firehose) from supported projects into your system:
    • Connect to the Realtime API stream to have all article revisions (updates) pushed directly to your system as they happen.
    • Use Realtime Batch to download new updates in a tarball (.tar.gz). These are updated on the hour with the last day of updates available.

Getting Started – First Step

To get started, sign up for a free account (no credit card required), verify your email, then follow the next steps on this page.

On this page: Quickstart Steps

  1. Getting your API Keys
  2. Example API Calls
  3. SDKs

Getting your API Keys

Now that you’ve setup and verified your account, send the username (all lowercase) and password you created to the /login endpoint to receive your tokens.

Wikimedia Enterprise APIs use JWT authentication passed in the header for access verification. All API requests must be made over HTTPS and must pass that Bearer access token in the header; without it the requests will fail.

curl -L https://auth.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v1/login -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username":"yourusername", "password":"secret"}'

Refresh tokens expire in 90 days.
Access and ID tokens expire in 1 day.
Use your Refresh token to obtain a new Access token before it expires.

An important reminder: Your credentials carry many privileges related to your account, so be careful to keep them secure. Do not share your credentials in publicly accessible areas such as GitHub, client-side code, etc.

{
  "id_token": "string",
  "access_token": "string",
  "refresh_token": "string",
  "expires_in": 86400
}

Example API Calls

Now you are ready to make your first call. Start by running this cURL command using your valid access_token. You’ll receive a list of all supported projects available to you in our APIs, including the project name, identifier, language, and more.

Note: the project identifier (e.g. “enwiki” for English Wikipedia) as that is the identifier you will use to identify the project and language in requests.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN" -L https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/projects

Next, try using the Snapshot API. Run this cURL command to download a compressed file (HTML dump) containing every article in English Wikipedia (it’s large).

Note: the “Snapshot identifier” is constructed with 3 items from our metadata endpoints: <language><project_name>_namespace_<number>

Uncompress that file to see NDJSON with each line representing a single article in the project. An example of an article’s payload can be seen on our API page, and to learn more about each field in the payload, see our data dictionary.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN" -L https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/snapshots/enwiki_namespace_0/download --output enwiki.tar.gz

Next, try calling the On-demand API to get single article (page) of interest. Let’s use NASA in English Wikipedia as an example, with this cURL command.

You’ll received a JSON response containing the same article data and format represented in the Snapshot API’s file. The main difference here (besides being able to query pages individually) is that this response returns the live version of the article that is actively on the project today, whereas the Snapshot updates daily (for paid users) or twice-monthly (for free users).

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/articles/NASA' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "filters": [
    {
      "field": "is_part_of.identifier",
      "value": "enwiki"
    }
  ],
  "limit": 1
}'

Software Development Kits (SDKs)

We have built some software development kits (SDK) in Go and Python to help you get started:

There you have it! You’ve created your account and made your first calls to Wikimedia Enterprise. Please explore the APIs, and the data dictionary that explains fields and schema. An OpenAPI spec yaml is available for you to ingest, and if you have some additional questions look through the FAQs or use your dashboard to contact support or provide feedback.

Wikimedia Enterprise operates a status page at https://status.enterprise.wikimedia.com displaying uptime history and current status.

If you are interested daily Snapshot dumps, Realtime firehose, or additional egress, contact us.