Wikipedia Pageviews Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

The Wikimedia REST Pageviews API answers one question well: how many times was this article viewed, on this day, by this kind of visitor? This Actor takes a list of article titles and a date range and returns one clean row per article per day (or month), with view counts split by access method (desktop, mobile app, mobile web) and agent type (human, spider, automated). This is a traffic/trend feed, not a content scraper — for article text (summary, infobox, references) see our separate wikipedia-article-scraper. The two listings target different buyer intent on purpose and don't overlap.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🔤 Title normalization done right — spaces, slashes, and non-ASCII characters (Beyoncé, AC/DC) are underscore-normalized and percent-encoded correctly before every request.
• 🫠 One bad article never fails the run — a title with no data for the requested range is logged and skipped; every other article still ships.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, one row per article per day/month, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 🌐 No key, no login, no proxy tax — the Wikimedia Pageviews API is public and keyless; we don't add proxy overhead you don't need.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for rows that land in your dataset, plus one small warm-up charge per run.

💡 Use cases

• SEO and content strategists sizing topic demand before committing to a content push.
• PR and media researchers tracking attention spikes around a campaign or news event.
• Trend analysts building time series of public interest in a topic, product, or public figure.
• Academics and researchers studying public interest patterns at scale.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Enter the article titles you want traffic for, and a start/end date.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
articles	array	yes	—	Wikipedia article titles. Spaces are allowed — normalized to underscores automatically.
project	string	no	en.wikipedia	Wikimedia project, e.g. en.wikipedia or commons.wikimedia.
startDate	string	yes	—	First date in the range, as YYYYMMDD.
endDate	string	yes	—	Last date in the range (inclusive), as YYYYMMDD. Must be on or after startDate.
access	string	no	all-access	One of all-access, desktop, mobile-app, mobile-web.
agent	string	no	user	One of all-agents, user, spider, automated.
granularity	string	no	daily	daily or monthly row cadence.

Example input

{
  "articles": ["Web_scraping", "ChatGPT", "Artificial_intelligence"],
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "startDate": "20260801",
  "endDate": "20260810",
  "access": "all-access",
  "agent": "user",
  "granularity": "daily"
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item — one article, one day (or month).

Field	Type	Notes
article	string	Article title, underscore-normalized.
project	string	Wikimedia project queried.
access	string	Access method filter applied.
agent	string	Agent type filter applied.
granularity	string	Row cadence — daily or monthly.
date	string	ISO-8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD).
views	integer	View count for that article/date/filter combination.

Example output

{
  "article": "Web_scraping",
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "access": "all-access",
  "agent": "user",
  "granularity": "daily",
  "date": "2026-08-01",
  "views": 1842
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.002	Per pageviews row written to the dataset

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• A title that redirects to a canonical page reports its own (often near-zero) view count, not the canonical article's — use canonical titles for accurate numbers.
• A 404 from Wikimedia can mean either "no data for this date range" or "this article doesn't exist" — the API doesn't distinguish, so both are logged and skipped the same way.
• The separate /top most-viewed-articles endpoint isn't covered in this version — it's a fast-follow candidate.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No. The Wikimedia Pageviews API is public and keyless — no auth, no login.

What happens if an article has no data for my date range?

That article is skipped with a warning and the run keeps going. If every article you asked for comes back empty, the run still succeeds with zero rows — it names exactly what was searched.

Can I get monthly instead of daily numbers?

Yes — set granularity to monthly and you'll get one row per month instead of one per day.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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