Wikipedia Article Scraper

Extract structured data from Wikipedia articles using the official MediaWiki API. Get article summaries, categories, images, metadata, and descriptions. Supports 300+ languages.

Features

• Extract article titles, summaries, and descriptions
• Get categories, images, and thumbnails
• Support for 300+ Wikipedia languages
• Two modes: scrape by URL or search by keyword
• Uses official Wikipedia REST + MediaWiki APIs
• No proxy or cookies required
• Lightweight HTTP-only (no browser)
• Proper rate limiting and User-Agent identification

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
articleUrls	Array	—	Wikipedia article URLs to scrape
searchQueries	Array	—	Search terms to find articles
maxArticlesPerQuery	Integer	5	Max articles per search query (1-50)
language	String	"en"	Wikipedia language code

Example: Scrape by URL

{
    "articleUrls": [
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)",
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence"
    ]
}

Example: Search by Keyword

{
    "searchQueries": ["machine learning", "quantum computing"],
    "maxArticlesPerQuery": 3,
    "language": "en"
}

Output

Field	Type	Description
title	String	Article title
url	String	Full Wikipedia URL
summary	String	Lead section extract (first few paragraphs)
description	String	Wikidata short description
categories	Array	Article categories
thumbnail	Object	Thumbnail image with source, width, height
images	Array	Image filenames from the article
lastModified	String	Last edit timestamp
language	String	Language code
pageId	Integer	Wikipedia page ID
scrapedAt	String	ISO timestamp when scraped

Use Cases

• Research — collect structured article data for academic or business research
• Content enrichment — augment your database with Wikipedia descriptions and metadata
• Knowledge graphs — build knowledge bases from Wikipedia's categorized data
• Education — gather article summaries for educational content
• SEO — analyze Wikipedia's coverage of topics in your niche
• Data science — use Wikipedia data for NLP training and analysis

FAQ

Is a proxy required?

No. Wikipedia's API is freely accessible. No proxy, cookies, or authentication needed.

What languages are supported?

All 300+ Wikipedia language editions. Set the language parameter to any valid code: en, fr, de, es, ja, zh, ru, pt, it, ar, ko, nl, pl, etc.

Are there rate limits?

Wikipedia asks for polite access with proper User-Agent headers. The scraper includes built-in delays (0.3-0.5s between requests) to respect Wikipedia's guidelines.

Can I scrape article content (full text)?

This scraper extracts the lead section summary. For full article text, the summary field contains a clean text extract of the opening paragraphs which is suitable for most use cases.