Wikipedia Featured & On-This-Day Scraper

Scrape Wikipedia's daily editorial highlights — the featured article of the day (TFA), the most-read articles with real pageview counts, the "in the news" stories, the picture of the day, and on-this-day historical events (events, births, deaths, holidays) — in one actor.

No API key. No login. No proxy required. Works across 300+ Wikipedia language editions.

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What this actor does

Wikipedia publishes a curated daily feed on its main page. This actor pulls that feed through the official Wikimedia REST API and flattens it into one clean dataset row per entity, so you can drop it straight into a spreadsheet, a database, a newsletter builder, or an LLM pipeline.

Mode	What you get
featured	Featured article of the day, top ~40 most-read articles with view counts and ranks, in-the-news stories, picture of the day
onthisday	Historical events for a month/day: selected, events, births, deaths, holidays, or all

Every row carries the title, a plain-text extract, a short description, a thumbnail image URL and a canonical Wikipedia URL. HTML in the news stories and image captions is stripped for you.

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Use cases

• Daily content automation — pipe the featured article and picture of the day into a CMS, Notion database, Slack channel or website widget every morning.
• Trivia and quiz apps — on-this-day events, births and deaths are ready-made question banks with sources, dates and images attached.
• Newsletters — "today in history" and "what the world read yesterday" sections, generated automatically with real Wikipedia pageview numbers.
• LLM corpora and RAG — clean, deduplicated, plain-text extracts with canonical URLs, ideal as grounded context or as a daily-refreshed knowledge snapshot.
• Trend research — the most-read list is a free daily pulse of global public attention.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	featured	featured or onthisday
dates	array	["2026-07-20"]	Dates as YYYY-MM-DD. In onthisday mode only month/day are used
language	string	en	Wikipedia language edition code (en, de, es, fr, ja, …)
onThisDayType	select	selected	all, selected, births, deaths, holidays, events
maxItems	integer	200	Hard cap on rows produced by the run (max 2000)

{
  "mode": "featured",
  "dates": ["2026-07-27", "2026-07-28"],
  "language": "en",
  "maxItems": 200
}

{
  "mode": "onthisday",
  "dates": ["2026-07-28"],
  "language": "en",
  "onThisDayType": "selected",
  "maxItems": 100
}

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Output

Featured mode

{
  "type": "mostread",
  "date": "2026-07-28",
  "language": "en",
  "title": "The Odyssey (2026 film)",
  "extract": "The Odyssey is a 2026 epic action fantasy film …",
  "description": "2026 film by Christopher Nolan",
  "thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/…jpg",
  "views": 581815,
  "rank": 4,
  "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(2026_film)",
  "source": "wikipedia",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T13:40:11Z"
}

type is one of tfa, mostread, news, image.

On-this-day mode

{
  "type": "onthisday",
  "event_type": "selected",
  "month": 7,
  "day": 28,
  "year": 2010,
  "text": "In the deadliest air accident in Pakistan's history, Airblue Flight 202 crashed …",
  "related_pages": ["Airblue Flight 202", "Margalla Hills", "Islamabad"],
  "first_page_extract": "Airblue Flight 202 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight …",
  "thumbnail": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/…jpg",
  "source": "wikipedia",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T13:40:12Z"
}

All fields are nullable — Wikipedia omits sections on some dates and language editions (for example, news only appears on very recent dates, and many smaller wikis have no featured article). The actor never crashes on a missing section; it simply leaves the field empty.

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or pull it through the Apify API.

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Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 items on the Apify platform, plus a few seconds of compute. A typical featured-feed day (about 50 rows) costs cents. The actor runs on 512 MB and finishes in seconds because it hits a single well-behaved JSON endpoint per date — no browser, no proxies.

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Tips

• Schedule it daily with the Apify scheduler and point it at today's date for an always-fresh content feed.
• onThisDayType: "all" can return 500+ rows for a single day — use maxItems to keep runs tight.
• Combine featured runs across several language values to compare what different countries read.
• Data comes from Wikipedia and is available under the CC BY-SA license — attribute Wikipedia when you republish text.

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Related actors

• Wikipedia Scraper — full article content, infoboxes, sections and links from any Wikipedia page.
• Wikipedia Pageviews Scraper — historical pageview time series and top-article rankings.
• Wikivoyage Scraper — travel guides, destinations and practical listings.
• Wikimedia Commons Scraper — free-license images, metadata and authorship.

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FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The Wikimedia REST API is public.

Which languages work? Any Wikipedia edition code. Coverage of the individual sections varies — English has all of them, smaller wikis often only have mostread, image and onthisday.

How far back can I go? The featured feed is archived for years; the most-read section is generally available from 2015 onwards. On-this-day is date-agnostic (month/day only).

Is scraping Wikipedia legal? This actor uses Wikimedia's official public REST API with a descriptive User-Agent, as their guidelines require. Content is CC BY-SA licensed.