Wikipedia Has a Secret REST API — Get Clean JSON Summaries for Any Topic

Wikipedia has a REST API that returns clean JSON summaries for any topic. No API key. No rate limits. No authentication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Electric_vehicle

Returns:

{
  "title": "Electric vehicle",
  "description": "Vehicle propelled by electric motors",
  "extract": "An electric vehicle (EV) is a vehicle that uses one or more electric motors for propulsion...",
  "thumbnail": {"source": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/...", "width": 320, "height": 213},
  "content_urls": {"desktop": {"page": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle"}}
}

Clean summary, thumbnail, description — in one API call.

What Else the API Does

• Search: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=web+scraping
• Full content: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/html/Electric_vehicle
• Related pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/related/Electric_vehicle
• Media: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/media-list/Electric_vehicle

Use Cases

Market research. Every Wikipedia article is a curated summary of a topic. Pull the extract + related pages for instant market overview.

Content enrichment. Add Wikipedia context to any dataset. Company names → industry descriptions. Technology names → explanations.

Knowledge bases. Build topic-specific knowledge bases from Wikipedia's structured data.

My MCP Market Research Server uses Wikipedia as one of 9 data sources — providing market overviews automatically.

All 77 tools: Apify Store

Custom data — $20: Order via Payoneer