Wikiquote Quotes Scraper 📜

Scrape clean, structured quotes from Wikiquote — by person or by topic — in seconds. Search for pages matching a keyword, or extract every quote line (with its source/attribution) from any Wikiquote page. Powered by the public MediaWiki API, so results are fast, reliable and datacenter-friendly (no residential proxies, no login, no API key).

Perfect for building quote databases, content pipelines, NLP datasets, social-media schedulers and educational apps.

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✨ Features

• Two modes: search (find pages by query) and pages (extract quotes from titles).
• Clean output: MediaWiki markup ([[links]], ''italics'', <ref>, {{templates}}) is fully stripped to plain, ready-to-use text.
• Source / attribution captured per quote from sub-bullet lines.
• Multi-language: any Wikiquote edition via the language field (en, de, fr, es, it, …).
• Fast & cheap: clean JSON API, no browser, runs on 512 MB.
• Structured dataset ready for CSV, JSON, Excel or API export.

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🚀 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	search (query → matching pages) or pages (titles → quotes).
query	string	Search term when mode = search (e.g. hope).
pages	array	Page titles when mode = pages (e.g. ["Albert Einstein","Mahatma Gandhi"]).
language	string	Wikiquote language edition. Default en.
maxItems	integer	Max items to push (default 200, max 2000).

Example — extract quotes

{
  "mode": "pages",
  "pages": ["Albert Einstein", "Mahatma Gandhi"],
  "language": "en",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example — search pages

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "hope",
  "maxItems": 50
}

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📤 Output

Search result (mode = search):

{
  "type": "page",
  "page": "Hope",
  "snippet": "Hope is a desire for future good...",
  "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hope",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-18T08:00:00+00:00"
}

Quote (mode = pages, one item per quote):

{
  "type": "quote",
  "page": "Albert Einstein",
  "quote": "Everything should be made simple as possible but no simpler.",
  "source": "Repeated throughout his life, see: Quote Investigator",
  "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-18T08:00:00+00:00"
}

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💰 Pricing

Pay-per-result style usage: approximately $0.50 per 1,000 quotes on the Apify platform (plus platform usage). A single popular page can yield hundreds of clean quotes, making it one of the cheapest ways to build a quote dataset.

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🎯 Use cases

• Content creation — populate blogs, newsletters and quote-of-the-day widgets.
• NLP / ML — build labelled quote corpora for sentiment, attribution and generation models.
• Social media — feed schedulers with fresh, attributed quotes by theme or author.
• Education — assemble teaching material, flashcards and study aids by topic or figure.

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🆚 Comparison

	Wikiquote Quotes Scraper	Manual copy-paste	Generic HTML scraper
Clean plain-text quotes	✅	⚠️ manual cleanup	❌ markup left in
Source/attribution	✅	⚠️	❌
Multi-language	✅	⚠️	⚠️
No proxies / key	✅	✅	❌ often blocked
Structured export	✅	❌	⚠️

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🔗 Related actors

• Wikipedia Scraper
• Wikidata Scraper
• PoetryDB Scraper
• Dictionary Scraper

Keywords: wikiquote scraper, quotes scraper, famous quotes api, quotes by author, quotes by topic, quote database, inspirational quotes dataset, mediawiki quotes, nlp quotes corpus, quote of the day api

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Wikiquote content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This actor only accesses publicly available data via the official MediaWiki API. Please attribute Wikiquote when reusing content.