Wikipedia Scraper

Fetches article summaries from Wikipedia. Search for articles, look up specific titles, or grab random pages. Supports 300+ language editions.

What data does it extract?

Field	Description
title	Article title
extract	Plain text summary (first few paragraphs)
description	Short Wikidata description (e.g. American tech company)
thumbnail	URL to the article's thumbnail image
originalImage	URL to the full-resolution main image
pageUrl	Direct link to the Wikipedia article
pageId	Numeric Wikipedia page ID
lastModified	ISO 8601 timestamp of the last edit
coordinates	Geographic coordinates {lat, lon} if the article has them
contentLength	Character count of the extract text

Use cases

• Knowledge bases — Pull article summaries for product databases, chatbots, or search indexes
• NLP training data — Collect thousands of article summaries in any language for text models
• Content enrichment — Add Wikipedia descriptions and images to existing datasets (companies, cities, people)
• Education tools — Build quiz apps or study guides from random or topic-specific articles
• Geographic datasets — Extract coordinates from place-related articles for mapping projects

How to use

Search for articles on a topic:

{
    "mode": "search",
    "searchQuery": "machine learning",
    "maxResults": 20
}

Get summaries for specific articles:

{
    "mode": "summary",
    "titles": ["SpaceX", "Tesla, Inc.", "Elon Musk"]
}

Fetch random articles in Spanish:

{
    "mode": "random",
    "language": "es",
    "maxResults": 50
}

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	"search"	Operation mode: "summary", "search", or "random"
titles	array	[]	Article titles to fetch (used in summary mode)
searchQuery	string	""	Search query text (used in search mode)
language	string	"en"	Wikipedia language code: en, es, de, fr, ja, pt, etc.
maxResults	integer	50	Max results for search and random modes (1-200)

Output example

{
    "title": "SpaceX",
    "extract": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launch service provider, defense contractor, and satellite communications company headquartered in Hawthorne, California.",
    "description": "American space transportation company",
    "thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/SpaceX_logo_black.svg/320px-SpaceX_logo_black.svg.png",
    "originalImage": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/SpaceX_logo_black.svg",
    "pageUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX",
    "pageId": 2677395,
    "lastModified": "2025-03-25T08:12:45Z",
    "coordinates": { "lat": 33.9206, "lon": -118.3283 },
    "contentLength": 412
}

Performance & cost

• Uses the Wikipedia REST and Action APIs directly — no browser, minimal compute
• Fetches up to 50 search results per API call, then gets each summary individually
• A search for 50 articles takes about 10-15 seconds (rate-limited to be polite to Wikipedia)

FAQ

Does this get the full article text? No, it returns the summary (first few paragraphs). Full article content would require a different API endpoint and is much heavier on data.

What languages are supported? Any Wikipedia language edition. Use the standard language code: en for English, es for Spanish, de for German, ja for Japanese, etc. Full list at wikipedia.org.

What's the difference between summary and search mode? summary takes exact article titles and returns their summaries. search takes a free-text query and finds matching articles.

Why do some articles have no image? Not every Wikipedia article has an associated image. The thumbnail and originalImage fields will be null for those.