Wikimedia REST API
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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.
Documentation
Reference
For reference documentation, select "Wikimedia REST APIs" on the REST Sandbox, which is also available on all Wikimedia projects (for example: REST Sandbox on English Wikipedia).
While the functionality offered by most projects closely matches that on English Wikipedia, there are some noteworthy exceptions:
- en.wiktionary.org offers an experimental definition end point, exposing Wiktionary information as structured data. Support for other languages is under discussion.
Quick start
The Wikimedia REST API is available for all major Wikimedia projects at the location /api/rest_v1/. For example, for the English Wikipedia endpoints may be called through the base path https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/.
# Get metadata for the Earth article on English Wikipedia
curl 'https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Earth'
Access policy
Stability policy
The REST API follows this API versioning policy.
Report a bug
Create an account on Wikimedia Phabricator, and tag the task with RESTBase-API.
Get help
Leave a comment on the discussion page.
Contribute
To edit the docs, see Gerrit/Tutorial to contribute to the OpenAPI descriptions.
Changelog
See also
- RESTBase, which is being deprecated, the technology behind the REST API
- Blog post announcing the 1.0 release. Describes several important production use cases, discusses how the REST API fits into Wikimedia's larger technical strategy, and provides pointers to some implementation details.
- The API is implemented using Node.js. This blog post describes our experience upgrading the REST API and other services to Node 6.
- MediaWiki Platform Team, product owners for the REST API.
- Core Platform Team/Initiatives/API Gateway (2020)
- For the REST API included with MediaWiki 1.35 and later, see the MediaWiki Core REST API.