API:Information in Wikimedia projects

Wikimedia's free open knowledge is available on web sites that anyone can edit, all running MediaWiki software. You're probably familiar with Wikipedia in your own language, but the range of content is larger.

Wikipedia and beyond
The "Wikipedia" in a particular language, such as https://my.wikipedia.org in Burmese, hosts information on thousands to millions of subjects.

The unit of information on a wiki is a page, for example https://my.wikipedia.org/wiki/ပါရီမြို့ is a wiki page that is the article about "Paris" in the Burmese language.

Other wikis
The Wikimedia Foundation supports many other collections of free open knowledge, see Our projects on the Wikimedia Foundation site for a complete list.

There are two important wikis that hold language-independent information, and thus are a single wiki (rather than a family of wikis in different languages): For example, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paris_Night.jpg has information about an image of Paris at night, including the URL of the image itself (as of August 2015 at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Paris_Night.jpg). A wiki editor in turn cropped this image to form, the banner at the top of the Wikivoyage article on Paris. For example, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q90 is the Wikidata page of the item with information about the City of Paris. The same information can display in other languages, for example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q90?uselang=pt is the page in Portuguese.
 * Commons hosts millions of freely usable images and other media files
 * Wikidata is a knowledgebase of millions of data items

Wikidata stores structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects, such as
 * "sitelinks" that connect the item to corresponding articles on other wikis, including the examples above on this page
 * the "Wikivoyage banner" for the item that is used on Wikivoyage articles about Paris above

Accessing information
You can simply link to pages in these wikis. You can also access the information in the page. To do so you use the same APIs to access all this content:


 * Display article HTML in your own application using a fast caching API called RESTBase.
 * Get information about articles using the MediaWiki "action=query" API, as explained in Page info in search results, and display these snippets of information.