Wikimedia REST API

The Wikimedia REST API offers access to Wikimedia's content and metadata in machine-readable formats. Focused on high-volume use cases, it tightly integrates with Wikimedia's globally distributed caching infrastructure. As a result, API users benefit from reduced latencies and support for high request volumes.

The REST API along with its documentation is available for all major Wikimedia projects at the location /api/rest_v1/. For example, for the English Wikipedia it is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/.

While the functionality offered by most projects closely matches that on English Wikipedia, there are some noteworthy exceptions:

Versioning

The REST API follows this API versioning policy.

Terms and conditions

  • By using the REST API, you agree to Wikimedia's general Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
  • To avoid impacting other API users, limit your clients to no more than 200 requests/sec to this API overall. Many entry points additionally specify and enforce more restrictive rate limits.
  • We ask you to set a unique User-Agent or Api-User-Agent header that allows us to contact you quickly. Email addresses or URLs of contact pages work well.

Other APIs

For the REST API included with MediaWiki 1.35 and later, see the MediaWiki Core REST API.

This table: view · talk · edit
API Availability URL base Example
  MediaWiki Action API Included with MediaWiki

Enabled on Wikimedia projects

/api.php https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=info&titles=Earth
  MediaWiki REST API Included with MediaWiki 1.35+

Enabled on Wikimedia projects

/rest.php https://en.wikipedia.org/w/rest.php/v1/page/Earth
  Wikimedia REST API Not included with MediaWiki

Available for Wikimedia projects only

/api/rest https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/title/Earth
  For commercial-scale APIs for Wikimedia projects, see Wikimedia Enterprise

See also