Wikipedia Data Extraction with Python: Complete Guide for 2026

Wikipedia is the largest free knowledge base on the internet. With structured infoboxes, categories, and interlinked articles, it's a goldmine for NLP datasets, knowledge graphs, and research. Here's how to extract Wikipedia data efficiently using both the API and direct scraping. Wikipedia API vs Scraping Wikipedia provides a comprehensive API (MediaWiki API) that should be your first choice. Scraping is only needed for data the API doesn't expose well. Using the Wikipedia API import requests import json WIKI_API = " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php " def get_article_content ( title ): """ Get full article content via the API. """ params = { " action " : " query " , " titles " : title , " prop " : " extracts|pageimages|categories|links " , " exintro " : False , " explaintext " : True , " pithumbsize " : 500 , " cllimit " : 50 , " pllimit " : 50 , " format " : " json " , } response = requests . get ( WIKI_API , params = params ) data = response . json () pages = data . get ( " query