Wikipedia Pageviews Scraper

Scrape Wikipedia pageview statistics and the daily top-viewed articles — fast, structured, and key-free. This Apify actor pulls article traffic data straight from the official Wikimedia REST Pageviews API and returns clean JSON/CSV rows you can drop into a dashboard, spreadsheet, or data warehouse.

Track how many people read a Wikipedia article each day or month, or discover what the whole world was reading on any given day. No API key, no login, no scraping fragile HTML.

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Features

• Per-article pageviews — daily or monthly traffic for any list of articles over any date range.
• Top viewed articles — the most-read Wikipedia pages for any day (up to 1,000 per day) or a whole month.
• Any language / project — en.wikipedia, de.wikipedia, es.wikipedia, fr.wikipedia, and every other Wikimedia project.
• Clean, typed output — one row per data point, ISO dates, integer view counts.
• No API key required — uses the free official Wikimedia REST API with a descriptive User-Agent.
• Datacenter-proxy friendly — runs cheaply without residential proxies.

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Modes

article — per-article pageviews

Provide a project, a list of articles, a granularity (daily or monthly), and a startDate/endDate (YYYYMMDD). You get one row per article per timestamp.

top — top viewed articles

Provide a project and a topYear / topMonth / topDay. Use a specific day (e.g. 01) for that day's ranking, or leave topDay empty / set it to all-days for every day in the month.

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Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	article or top.
project	string	Wikimedia project, e.g. en.wikipedia. Default en.wikipedia.
articles	array	Article titles (article mode). Default ["Python_(programming_language)", "Artificial_intelligence"].
granularity	select	daily or monthly (article mode). Default daily.
startDate	string	Range start YYYYMMDD (article mode).
endDate	string	Range end YYYYMMDD (article mode).
topYear	string	Year (top mode), e.g. 2024.
topMonth	string	Two-digit month (top mode), e.g. 01.
topDay	string	Two-digit day or all-days (top mode).
maxItems	integer	Max output rows. Default 1000, max 10000.

Example input (article mode)

{
  "mode": "article",
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "articles": ["Python_(programming_language)", "Artificial_intelligence"],
  "granularity": "daily",
  "startDate": "20240101",
  "endDate": "20240131"
}

Example input (top mode)

{
  "mode": "top",
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "topYear": "2024",
  "topMonth": "01",
  "topDay": "01"
}

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Output

Article mode

{
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "article": "Python_(programming_language)",
  "timestamp": "2024-01-01",
  "granularity": "daily",
  "views": 8763,
  "scraped_at": "2024-06-22T10:00:00+00:00"
}

Top mode

{
  "project": "en.wikipedia",
  "article": "Main_Page",
  "rank": 1,
  "views": 4817450,
  "date": "2024-01-01",
  "scraped_at": "2024-06-22T10:00:00+00:00"
}

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via the Apify API.

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Use cases

• Trend analysis — spot spikes in interest around events, launches, and news.
• SEO & content strategy — see which topics attract attention and time your content.
• Academic research — study attention, information demand, and cultural trends.
• Content planning — mine daily top articles for ideas that are already popular.

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Pricing & cost

This actor is lightweight and cheap to run. As a rule of thumb it costs about $0.5 per 1,000 result rows, plus minimal platform compute. A typical per-article run over a month, or one day of top articles, costs only a few cents. Actual cost depends on your Apify plan and the number of rows you request (maxItems).

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Comparison

	Wikipedia Pageviews Scraper	Manual API calls	HTML scraping
API key required	No	No	No
Structured JSON/CSV	Yes	Raw JSON only	Fragile
Top + per-article in one tool	Yes	DIY	No
Date-range batching	Yes	DIY	No
Any project/language	Yes	Yes	Varies
Maintenance	Managed	You	Constant

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Related actors

• Wikipedia Scraper — full article content & metadata.
• Wikidata Scraper — structured entity data.
• Google News Scraper — news headlines & articles.
• GDELT News Scraper — global news events dataset.

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Support

Questions, feature requests, or issues? Reach out via the Apify contact form on the actor page. We respond quickly and welcome feedback.

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Keywords: wikipedia pageviews, wikipedia traffic, article views, wikimedia api, top articles, pageview statistics, wikipedia analytics, trend analysis, wikipedia scraper, page view data