# Wikipedia Featured & On-This-Day Scraper (`ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper`) Actor

$0.5/1K 🔥 Wikipedia featured scraper! Article of the day, most-read pages, news & on-this-day events. No key. JSON, CSV, Excel or API in seconds. Power daily content & trivia apps ⚡

- **URL**: https://apify.com/ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [ninhothedev](https://apify.com/ninhothedev) (community)
- **Categories:** News, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $0.50 / 1,000 results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/actors-in-store#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

Actors are web data automations that power AI and operations. They run on the Apify platform to scrape websites, process data, connect APIs, and automate workflows.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Actors are written with capital "A".

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
The best way to integrate Actors is as follows.

- **AI agents and MCP clients** — the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md) at `https://mcp.apify.com` (remote, streamable HTTP, OAuth on first use).
- **Agentic workflows and local Actor development** — [Agent Skills](https://apify.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with the [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md): `npm install -g apify-cli`, then `apify login`.
- **JavaScript/TypeScript projects** — the official [JS/TS client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md): `npm install apify-client`.
- **Python projects** — the official [Python client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md): `pip install apify-client`.
- **Any other language** — the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md).

For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below.

For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt).

# README

## 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**.

***

### 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.

***

### 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.

***

### 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) |

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

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

***

### Output

**Featured mode**

```json
{
  "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**

```json
{
  "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.

***

### 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.

***

### 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.

***

### Related actors

- [Wikipedia Scraper](https://apify.com/ninhothedev/wikipedia-scraper) — full article content,
  infoboxes, sections and links from any Wikipedia page.
- [Wikipedia Pageviews Scraper](https://apify.com/ninhothedev/wikipedia-pageviews-scraper) —
  historical pageview time series and top-article rankings.
- [Wikivoyage Scraper](https://apify.com/ninhothedev/wikivoyage-scraper) — travel guides,
  destinations and practical listings.
- [Wikimedia Commons Scraper](https://apify.com/ninhothedev/wikimedia-commons-scraper) —
  free-license images, metadata and authorship.

***

### 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.

# Actor input Schema

## `mode` (type: `string`):

What to scrape. 'featured' returns the daily featured article (TFA), the most-read articles with view counts, in-the-news stories and the picture of the day for each date. 'onthisday' returns historical events that happened on a given month/day.

## `dates` (type: `array`):

Dates to scrape in YYYY-MM-DD format, e.g. 2026-07-20. In 'onthisday' mode only the month and day are used, so the year can be anything (MM-DD is also accepted). Add as many dates as you like - each one is fetched separately.

## `language` (type: `string`):

Wikipedia language edition code, e.g. 'en' (English), 'de' (German), 'es' (Spanish), 'fr' (French), 'ja' (Japanese). Note that not every language edition publishes every section - some have no featured article of the day.

## `onThisDayType` (type: `string`):

Which kind of historical entries to return in 'onthisday' mode. 'selected' = the curated highlights shown on the main page, 'events' = all notable events, 'births'/'deaths' = people born or who died that day, 'holidays' = observances, 'all' = every category at once. Ignored in 'featured' mode.

## `maxItems` (type: `integer`):

Hard cap on the number of dataset rows produced by the run, across all dates. Use it to keep runs small and predictable - the on-this-day 'all' type alone can return several hundred entries per day.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "mode": "featured",
  "dates": [
    "2026-07-20"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "onThisDayType": "selected",
  "maxItems": 200
}
```

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "dates": [
        "2026-07-20"
    ],
    "language": "en"
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "dates": ["2026-07-20"],
    "language": "en",
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "dates": [
    "2026-07-20"
  ],
  "language": "en"
}' |
apify call ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,ninhothedev/wikipedia-featured-scraper"
        }
    }
}

```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/VaLAE3hNIoSM6ai7W/builds/AwBBfCMqFDUMTjlh9/openapi.json