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Wikimedia / Wikipedia API

Page summaries, full article HTML, search and media from every Wikimedia project, no key

Wikimedia exposes free HTTP APIs over Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews and every other project. The legacy REST endpoint (/api/rest_v1) returns clean page summaries, full HTML and PDFs, while the long-standing MediaWiki Action API (/w/api.php) handles full-text search, parsing and metadata. Both are usable with no signup or key.

Free tier

Free, no key. Anonymous requests are capped per IP; add a Wikimedia personal API token for higher limits

Rate limits

Anonymous: 500 req/hour/IP (5,000/hour with a personal API token), confirmed March 2026. Action API: no fixed published number; requires a descriptive User-Agent and serial requests

Auth

No key

Base URL

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1

What you'd build with it

  • Ground a Claude Skill with authoritative encyclopedia summaries for RAG
  • Resolve and disambiguate entities by searching article titles
  • Pull lead-section extracts to enrich a knowledge base or chatbot answer
  • Fetch full article HTML for chunking and embedding

Key endpoints

  • GET/page/summary/{title}Title, extract, thumbnail and description for a page (REST)
  • GET/page/html/{title}Full rendered article HTML (REST)
  • GET/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch={q}Full-text search across a wiki (Action API)
  • GET/w/api.php?action=parse&page={title}Parsed wikitext, sections and links (Action API)
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

knowledgewikipediasearchreferenceencyclopedia