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:
- wikimedia.org offers cross-project information like page view metrics.
- en.wiktionary.org offers an experimental definition end point, exposing Wiktionary information as structured data. Support for other languages is under discussion.
Versioning
[edit]The REST API follows this API versioning policy.
Terms and conditions
[edit]- 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-AgentorApi-User-Agentheader that allows us to contact you quickly. Email addresses or URLs of contact pages work well.
Other APIs
[edit]For the REST API included with MediaWiki 1.35 and later, see the MediaWiki Core REST API.
| 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
[edit]- 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)