Microproduct data guidebeginner

Wikimedia Pageviews

Per-article and project pageview counts for building attention monitors and topic-trend tools.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.1 GB
Formats
JSON
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
Wikimedia Foundation
Updates
Daily
Data terms
CC0 1.0 Universal

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

The Wikimedia Analytics API reports pageviews for Wikimedia projects. Start with one English Wikipedia article and a short daily window. Send a descriptive User-Agent with contact information; generic python-requests clients may be blocked. Pageviews are not a measure of quality or demand.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Read the Analytics API access policy, including the User-Agent requirement.
  2. 2.Choose one article title encoded for the URL path.
  3. 3.Request a bounded daily pageview series and keep requests serial.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/pageviews/per-article/"
    "en.wikipedia/all-access/user/Earth/daily/20250801/20250807",
    headers={
        "User-Agent": (
            "TrilemmaDataCatalogExample/1.0 "
            "(https://data.trilemma.foundation)"
        )
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
pageviews = pd.DataFrame(response.json()["items"])
pageviews["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(pageviews[["timestamp", "views"]])
4

Test a useful signal

Chart one Wikipedia article's daily pageviews

Describe how views of one article moved across a seven-day window.

  1. 01Confirm the response includes daily view counts for the selected article and dates.
  2. 02Plot views over time and note spikes that may reflect news coverage rather than lasting interest.
  3. 03State that pageviews are not a measure of article quality, public opinion, or product demand.

Dataset details

Wikimedia Foundation is a community source. Last verified 2026-08-14. Temporal coverage: 2015-07-01-present.

Theme

Research & Reference

Domains

Attention MeasurementCurrent EventsResearch

Data types

Time Series

Tasks

Trend AnalysisTopic ResearchAlerting

Geography

Global

Formats

JSON

Provider

Wikimedia Foundation

Data terms

CC0 1.0 Universal