Wikipedia API

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites on the internet, because it is the largest single online source of human-created knowledge: over 68 million articles across 348 language editions. It is also one of the last places where strict policies guarantee that what you read was written and checked by people, held to a neutral point of view, and revised as the world moves. At roughly five edits every second, Wikipedia changes about as fast as the events it describes. That makes it a prime source for training LLMs, grounding AI agents, building RAG and reasoning systems, and keeping any knowledge base current.

Is there a Wikipedia API? Yes, several. The one built and run by the Wikimedia Foundation for high-volume and commercial use is Wikimedia Enterprise. Whether you are shipping a small app or training a frontier model, there is an access tier sized for it, and the free one starts instantly.

Why use the Wikipedia API?

Wikipedia is the reference standard for human-verified knowledge. It is a peer-reviewed corpus, which is exactly what grounding and factual accuracy require, and it is consistently the largest single source in published AI training-data breakdowns. It powers voice assistants, search knowledge panels, and knowledge graphs across the industry.

• Factual ground truth: unlike raw web-scraped text, Wikipedia content is governed by verifiability and neutral point of view policies. Real people patrol, discuss, revert, and reach consensus on every change.
• Transparent process: every article carries a full public revision history and a talk page where its disputes were argued out. The reasoning behind the text is part of the record, not hidden behind an editorial wall.
• Massive multilingual corpus: 68 million articles across 348 language editions, which is an unmatched dataset for machine translation and cross-lingual NLP.
• Structured metadata: beyond prose, the API exposes infoboxes, categories, templates, and the Wikidata item behind each article, ready for knowledge graph work.
• Realtime updates: breaking news, scientific results, and elections land on Wikipedia in minutes. The Realtime API streams those changes as they happen.

What data do the Wikipedia APIs return?

The Wikimedia Enterprise APIs let you pull everything from a single article or download a full Wikipedia dump for a knowledge graph, database, or training run.

• Structured Contents: you do not have to parse messy wikitext. Structured Contents delivers abstracts, sections, infoboxes, images, and links as clean JSON, so you can use Wikipedia's knowledge immediately with no post-processing.
• Credibility signals: actionable metadata for judging whether a given edit should be trusted. RevertRisk scores how likely an edit is to be reverted, and ReferenceRisk gauges whether it cited an adequate source.
• Linked data: the additional_entities field connects every article to its Wikidata item, which in turn links the same concept across every language edition and every other Wikimedia project.
• Wikitext and HTML: articles are authored in wikitext, a markup language of its own. The API returns the body in both wikitext, which preserves the markup and its template references, and rendered HTML, which expands those templates the way a reader sees them. One call gets you both.
• Categories: almost every article belongs to one or more categories, returned in the categories array. Categories are the fastest route to topic-based subsets and to edges in a knowledge graph.
• Rich metadata: when the page was last edited and by whom, when it was created, its protection status, the templates it uses, its watcher count, and more.
• Openly licensed: Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA and the GNU Free Documentation License, so you can reuse it for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you attribute the source and share derivative work under the same license.

How leading companies use the Wikipedia API

How to access Wikipedia data

Wikipedia data is delivered through the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs: three APIs, one account, one access token, and the same JSON schema across all of them.

• Snapshot API: download the sum of all human knowledge as bulk dumps, one bundle per language edition, for offline processing and training.
• On-demand API: retrieve specific articles from any language edition, refreshed every two weeks on a free account and daily on a paid one.
• Realtime API: stream Wikipedia's edits as they happen.

Example call to download the latest English Wikipedia snapshot:

curl -L 'https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/snapshots/enwiki_namespace_0/download' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN'

Example call to get a single article from English Wikipedia:

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

Getting a 403: Forbidden error? Sign up for a free Wikimedia Enterprise account and use the Login endpoint to get an access token. Getting started walks through the whole first call.

What comes back in a Wikipedia response

A single On-demand response carries the article body in both HTML and wikitext, the revision and its editor, the linked Wikidata entity, categories, templates, protection status, license, and the lead image.

The API products page shows a complete live response for an English Wikipedia article, refreshed from the production API, and the Data Dictionary documents every field in it. The API reference has the full schema and a request builder.

Wikipedia and Wikidata together

Wikipedia holds articles written for people. Wikidata holds the structured facts and relationships behind that same knowledge, stored as triples in a graph database that machines can traverse directly.

The two connect through the article's Q-number. Pull an article, read additional_entities, and you have a key into every other language version of it and into the same concept on Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, and the rest.

"additional_entities": [
  {
    "identifier": "Q309751",
    "url": "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q309751",
    "aspects": ["C.P18", "S", "T"]
  }
]

Pass that Q-number to the Wikidata endpoint to get the structured record:

curl -L 'https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/wikidata/items/Q309751' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN'

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

Access Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the rest of the Wikimedia project data through one unified API with consistent JSON output. Unlock the power of trusted knowledge on high-availability infrastructure, and get started with free instant access today.