Wikipedia REST API

Official Wikipedia API for retrieving article summaries, full text, featured content, and on-this-day events.

Status
🟢 Online · 720 ms

30-day uptime
100%

Free tier
Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent

Auth
No key required

Last 30 days

Free alternatives (live ranking)

Hacker News API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, no credit card
DEV Community API — 🟢 Online · 30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
Spaceflight News API — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Compare Wikipedia REST API with…

Wikipedia REST API vs Hacker News API — Unlimited, no key, no credit card
Wikipedia REST API vs DEV Community API — 30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
Wikipedia REST API vs Spaceflight News API — Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Official docs ↗

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Wikipedia REST API require an API key?

No, Wikipedia REST API is freely accessible without registration or an API key.

What is Wikipedia REST API's free tier?

Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent

Is Wikipedia REST API currently online?

We check Wikipedia REST API every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.

Implementation notes

When to use Wikipedia REST API

The Wikipedia REST API is unbeatable for projects that need encyclopedia-quality reference data: article summaries, full content (in HTML or wikitext), redirects, image metadata, and related-article links. Unlimited, no key, no commercial restriction.

Common pitfalls

User-Agent is required — the API will block requests with a generic or missing User-Agent. Use a format like `MyApp/1.0 ([email protected])` so the Wikimedia team can contact you if you cause problems.
Article slugs are case-sensitive and use underscores for spaces. `Python_(programming_language)` works; `python (programming language)` returns 404. The slug must match the canonical Wikipedia URL exactly.
Summary responses include both 'extract' (plain text) and 'extract_html' (formatted) — but the HTML version uses Wikipedia-specific class names that don't render cleanly without their stylesheets.

Quick start (bash)

curl -H "User-Agent: MyApp/1.0 ([email protected])" "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/REST_API"

From our monitoring

Wikipedia's REST API is among the fastest in our monitoring — typically 50-150ms response times — because Wikimedia uses Varnish caching aggressively. Cache hits are nearly free; cache misses for obscure articles can take 1-2 seconds.

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Markdown

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HTML

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