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Wikimedia

Upmediaby Wikimedia

Wikimedia API provides content access to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other Wikimedia projects — articles, media files, structured data.

Visit site ↗Health checked 9h ago
Use it when

Completely free, no API key, no rate limits (reasonable use)

Watch for

Auto-blocks abusive IPs (reasonable use is fine)

First check

GET https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Einstein for article summary. MediaWiki API at /w/api.php supports more complex queries.

Auth
—
CORS
No
HTTPS
Yes
Signup
?
Latency
853 ms
Protocol
REST
Pricing
—

Uptime · 30-day window

Probes: 1Uptime: 100%Avg latency: 853ms
01

About this API

The Wikimedia family's APIs (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, etc.) is open knowledge infrastructure. Two most common: (1) Wikipedia REST API — fetch article summary, full text, images, references, related links by title. Used heavily in LLM RAG apps. (2) Wikidata SPARQL/REST — structured data (every fact is entity + property + value triple), great for knowledge graphs, cross-language alignment, AI training. Wikimedia Commons API offers 80M+ free media files (images, videos, audio), all CC-licensed for commercial use. Completely free with reasonable use (no explicit rate limit but abusive behavior gets IP blocked).

02

What you can build

  • 1RAG knowledge source for AI assistants
  • 2Wikipedia mirror/search apps
  • 3Knowledge graphs based on Wikidata
  • 4Commons media file search
03

Strengths & limitations

Strengths

  • Completely free, no API key, no rate limits (reasonable use)
  • 300+ language editions
  • CC BY-SA open content

Limitations

  • Auto-blocks abusive IPs (reasonable use is fine)
  • Controversial content gets frequent edits — data freshness is double-edged
04

Example request

Generic template — replace <endpoint> with the real path from the docs.
curl http://mediawiki.org/wiki/REST_API/<endpoint>
05

Getting started

GET https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Einstein for article summary. MediaWiki API at /w/api.php supports more complex queries.

06

FAQ

What's the rate limit?+

No official explicit number. "Reasonable use" generally means 200/sec is fine. For bulk crawling, use Wikipedia dumps (monthly releases).

Which endpoint for Chinese Wikipedia?+

Change host: https://zh.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/...

07

Technical details

CORS: NoHTTPS: YesSignup: ?Open source: No
Auth type
unknown
Pricing
unknown
Protocols
REST
SDKs
python, javascript, php, go
Response time
853 ms
Last health check
5/12/2026, 7:38:39 AM
08

Tags

wikipediawikimediaknowledge-baseopen-data