Wikiversity API

Wikiversity is the Wikimedia sister project dedicated to learning. It hosts course modules, lesson plans, study guides, learning activities, and original research for every level of education, from pre-school through university. Wikiversity grew out of Wikibooks in 2006 and now runs in 17 language editions holding around 175,000 pages, with English and German the largest at roughly 55,000 each.

Access Wikiversity through the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs to train models on pedagogical reasoning, build tutoring agents that teach a topic rather than summarize it, generate curriculum and study material, and ground research tools in openly licensed scholarship.

Learning material written by teachers and students

Wikiversity is built for active instruction. Volunteers, educators, and students write the course material, design the learning activities, and maintain the site's policies, the same way every other Wikimedia project is written and curated by people. Content is dual-licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License.

• Three kinds of content, one project: learning materials are the open educational resources, the syllabi, lecture notes, slides, study guides, and exams. Learning communities are the self-directed spaces where students and teachers work through a subject together. Scholarly research is original, collaborative work published on the wiki itself.
• Original research lives here: Wikiversity is the Wikimedia project that hosts original scholarship, which makes it a distinct corpus from encyclopedic reference content. Three peer-reviewed WikiJournals sit on the platform, covering medicine, science, and the humanities, publishing in a stable, indexed, citable form with no author fees.
• Written for Wikiversity: its articles are composed on the platform or adapted from open educational resources, and its policies keep the text human-written rather than machine-generated. That gives you a clean instructional corpus rather than a rewrite of material you already hold.
• Rich media throughout: Wikiversity leans on diagrams, schematics, and photographs from Wikimedia Commons to carry the harder concepts, so the visuals that explain a lesson come with it.

Build tutoring systems and context-aware EdTech tools

Wikiversity sits inside the wider Wikimedia knowledge graph, so a course module connects outward to definitions, source texts, and structured facts.

• Layer it with the sister projects: combine Wikiversity with Wikipedia for reference context, Wikibooks for structured textbooks, and Wiktionary for terminology, and a learner gets a definition, a deep dive, and a lesson from one pipeline.
• Follow the entity, not the string: Wikiversity pages link to Wikidata items, which is how a subject stays the same subject across 17 languages and across every project that covers it.
• Model the progression: portals index departments, resources break into units, and subpages carry the sequence in the page name itself, so a course reads as an ordered curriculum rather than a bag of documents.

What data can I find in Wikiversity?

A Wikiversity page is usually one unit of something larger: a course, a portal, or a research project. Portals act as the departmental index and link out to the resources beneath them. The subject range covers physical sciences, life sciences, humanities, professional studies, and computing, at levels from pre-school activities up to graduate seminars.

A Wikiversity resource generally holds:

• Learning objectives: what the learner needs going in and what they should be able to do coming out.
• Core learning content: the body of the lesson, broken into headed subsections that map to lectures, modules, or steps in an argument.
• Learning activities: assignments, research tasks, discussion prompts, and review questions, which is the material that trains and evaluates automated assessment.
• References and further resources: citations and onward links, both to external sources and to other wikis.

Where to find other instructional data

Several Wikimedia projects carry teaching material, each in its own shape. Wikibooks is the library of instructional textbooks, manuals, and how-to guides, organized into chapters and learning modules, and it overlaps with Wikiversity by design: Wikiversity teaches a subject collaboratively, Wikibooks writes the book on it.

Published works out of copyright, including historical textbooks and primary documents, are held by Wikisource, a library of free source texts and translations.

How to access Wikiversity data

Retrieve a full language edition with the Snapshot API, or request a single resource with the On-demand API. Both are part of the Wikimedia Enterprise API suite, and one access token covers every Wikiversity edition alongside every other Wikimedia project.

Example call to download the full English Wikiversity snapshot:

curl -L 'https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/snapshots/enwikiversity_namespace_0/download' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN'

Example call to get one calculus lesson from English Wikiversity:

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

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

What comes back in a Wikiversity response

A Wikiversity page arrives in the same JSON envelope as any other Wikimedia page, so one parser covers all 17 editions:

• article_body.wikitext and article_body.html hold the resource, in source markup and rendered form.
• name carries the course path, so Calculus/Real_Numbers_and_Their_Development tells you which course a lesson belongs to before you open it.
• categories is the subject index: department, discipline, and level all surface here.
• main_entity links the topic to its Wikidata item, which is how a lesson on limits matches the article on limits.
• version records the revision, its editor, and its size, and license states the terms the page ships under.

The heading structure is where the teaching sits. Objectives, lesson body, activities, and references arrive as headed sections, so a parser reading article_body.wikitext can keep a review question attached to the material it tests instead of flattening a course into plain text. The Data Dictionary documents every field, and the API reference has the full schema alongside a live example response.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

Access Wikiversity, Wikipedia, and the rest of the Wikimedia project data through one unified API with consistent JSON output. Put openly licensed, human-taught knowledge behind your learning tools on enterprise-grade infrastructure, and get started with free instant access today.