Wikipedia API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/JavaScript

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 2,556 bytes · compressed

Response time

112 ms (median of 3) · fastest 104 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 · certificate issued by Let's Encrypt

Browser CORS

Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Served by

production-tls

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/JavaScript on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

{
  "type": "standard",
  "title": "JavaScript",
  "displaytitle": "<span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\"><span class=\"mw-page-title-main\">JavaScript</span></span>",
  "namespace": {
    "id": 0,
    "text": ""
  },
  "wikibase_item": "Q2005",
  "titles": {
    "canonical": "JavaScript",
    "normalized": "JavaScript",
    "display": "<span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\"><span class=\"mw-page-title-main\">JavaScript</span></span>"
  },
  "pageid": 9845,
  "thumbnail": {
    "source": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Logo_of_TC39.svg/330px-Logo_of_TC39.svg.png?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_conten…",
    "width": 330,
    "height": 330
  },
  "originalimage": {
    "source": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Logo_of_TC39.svg/960px-Logo_of_TC39.svg.png?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_conten…",
    "width": 512,
    "height": 512
  },
  "lang": "en",
  "dir": "ltr",
  "revision": "1366826697",
  "tid": "bc837da8-8c19-11f1-8f98-1432fb13bb6a",
  "timestamp": "2026-07-30T13:22:39Z",
  "…": "(5 more fields)"
}

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/JavaScript";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/JavaScript"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/JavaScript"

What Can You Build?

// Fetch open data records
const response = await fetch(`https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page`);
const data = await response.json();
const records = data.results || data.data || data.records || [];
const items = Array.isArray(records) ? records : [records];
items.slice(0, 5).forEach(item => {
  console.log('Record:', item.title || item.name || JSON.stringify(item));
});

// Fetch data for visualization
const response = await fetch(`https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page`);
const data = await response.json();
const dataset = data.data || data.results || data;
console.log('Dataset loaded:', Array.isArray(dataset) ? dataset.length : 1, 'records');
document.getElementById('viz').innerHTML =
  `<pre>${JSON.stringify(dataset, null, 2)}</pre>`;

// Search and filter open data
const response = await fetch(`https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page`);
const data = await response.json();
const results = data.results || data.data || [];
const filtered = Array.isArray(results) 
  ? results.filter(r => r.name || r.title)
  : [results];
console.log(`Found ${filtered.length} matching records`);

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

{
  "status": 400,
  "type": "Internal error"
}

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.