Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Scraper

🗂️ Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Scraper

🚀 Export Wikimedia Commons WikiProject pages in seconds. 20 fields per project, one row per page, up to 1,000,000 rows per run.

Wikimedia Commons hosts hundreds of WikiProjects, the volunteer groups that curate media around a topic such as insects, aviation or chemistry. Their pages hold rosters, goals, section structure and edit history, but the site offers no export for them. This Actor reads each WikiProject page through the public Commons API and returns it as one flat row with 20 fields: image, name, status, shortcut, description, participants, sections, categories, creation and last-edit dates. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Wikimedia community organizers	Audit which WikiProjects are active and who is on their rosters
Digital archivists and GLAM staff	Map thematic coverage and find projects to partner with
Open-knowledge researchers	Study volunteer coordination across projects over time
Data journalists	Track when projects were founded and when they went quiet

📋 What the Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Scraper does

💡 Why it matters: WikiProject rosters and status are scattered across wikitext, subpages and hidden categories. This Actor normalizes all of it into one table.

• 🔗 Direct URLs: paste any Commons:WikiProject ... page URLs; each becomes one row. Titles are matched case-insensitively, so WikiProject_insects still resolves to WikiProject Insects.
• 🔍 Topic search: give search terms such as birds or heraldry and the Actor finds matching WikiProjects through the Commons search API, up to your max items.
• 📚 Full listing: leave both empty and it lists WikiProjects alphabetically.
• 👥 Rosters from anywhere: participants are read from Participants or Members sections and from /Members or /Participants subpages.
• 🟢 Status detection: pages tagged historical or inactive come back as Inactive, everything else as Active.
• 🕒 Edit history: creation date and creator, last edit date and editor, page size in bytes.
• 🌐 No browser, no login: it uses the open MediaWiki API with a polite delay between calls; a proxy is available but off by default.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

📊 Output

Field	Description
🖼 imageUrl	First image on the page as a direct upload.wikimedia.org URL, or N/A
📌 projectName	WikiProject name without the Commons: prefix
📄 pageTitle	Full page title on Wikimedia Commons
🔗 url	Canonical page URL
🆔 pageId	MediaWiki page id
🟢 status	Active, or Inactive when the page is marked historical or inactive
⚡ shortcut	COM: shortcuts declared on the page, or Not Disclosed
📝 description	First paragraph of the page as plain text, or Not Disclosed
👥 participantCount	Number of participants found
🧩 sectionCount	Number of section headings
📏 contentLength	Page size in bytes
🗓 createdAt	Timestamp of the first revision (ISO 8601)
✍️ createdBy	User who created the page
🕒 lastEditedAt	Timestamp of the latest revision (ISO 8601)
✏️ lastEditedBy	User of the latest revision
📑 sections	Section headings in page order
🙋 participants	User names listed as participants or members
🏷 categories	Categories of the page, hidden ones included
🕒 scrapedAt	When the row was collected
❌ error	null on success; a page that could not be read produces a row with only this field

Three real records from a run:

[
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/System-file-manager-brown.svg",
    "projectName": "WikiProject Insects",
    "pageTitle": "Commons:WikiProject Insects",
    "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WikiProject_Insects",
    "pageId": 495944,
    "status": "Inactive",
    "shortcut": "Not Disclosed",
    "description": "This WikiProject aims primarily to document in photograph, sound and video all species of Insecta.",
    "participantCount": 5,
    "sectionCount": 10,
    "contentLength": 4923,
    "createdAt": "2006-01-04T21:54:08Z",
    "createdBy": "TeunSpaans",
    "lastEditedAt": "2026-07-16T20:15:46Z",
    "lastEditedBy": "TenshiBot",
    "sections": [
      "Article titles and common names",
      "Categories",
      "Status",
      "Quality",
      "Resources",
      "Requests",
      "Sister WikiProjects",
      "Participants",
      "Sample articles",
      "Cleanup"
    ],
    "participants": [
      "TeunSpaans",
      "Svdmolen",
      "Kulac",
      "Keith Edkins",
      "Giancarlodessi"
    ],
    "categories": [
      "Inactive Commons pages"
    ],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-08T01:11:55.043Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Gnome-applications-science.svg",
    "projectName": "WikiProject Chemistry",
    "pageTitle": "Commons:WikiProject Chemistry",
    "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WikiProject_Chemistry",
    "pageId": 1473569,
    "status": "Active",
    "shortcut": "COM:CHEM",
    "description": "This WikiProject is the Commons branch of the WikiProject Chemistry and other language Wikipedia workgroups (see interwiki links in the left column).",
    "participantCount": 0,
    "sectionCount": 2,
    "contentLength": 2554,
    "createdAt": "2006-12-18T17:24:45Z",
    "createdBy": "Benjah-bmm27",
    "lastEditedAt": "2023-11-03T16:05:50Z",
    "lastEditedBy": "Ameisenigel",
    "sections": [
      "To-do list",
      "Quality assurance"
    ],
    "participants": [],
    "categories": [
      "Commons WikiProjects",
      "Chemistry",
      "WikiProject Chemistry"
    ],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-08T01:11:56.458Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/People_icon.svg",
    "projectName": "WikiProject Birds",
    "pageTitle": "Commons:WikiProject Birds",
    "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WikiProject_Birds",
    "pageId": 1787159,
    "status": "Active",
    "shortcut": "Not Disclosed",
    "description": "This WikiProject descends from commons:WikiProject Tree of Life. It aims primarily to document in photograph, sound and video all species of birds.",
    "participantCount": 16,
    "sectionCount": 13,
    "contentLength": 5717,
    "createdAt": "2007-03-14T21:41:49Z",
    "createdBy": "Tony Wills",
    "lastEditedAt": "2024-11-07T12:29:20Z",
    "lastEditedBy": "Manojk",
    "sections": [
      "Overview",
      "New to Commons?",
      "Fill the gaps!",
      "Categories",
      "Status",
      "Quality",
      "Resources",
      "Requests",
      "Identification",
      "Sister WikiProjects",
      "Participants",
      "Sample articles",
      "Cleanup"
    ],
    "participants": [
      "Tony Wills",
      "Wsiegmund",
      "Anniolek",
      "Mindaugas Urbonas",
      "Dysmorodrepanis",
      "Tigershrike",
      "MeegsC",
      "Shyamal",
      "Dger",
      "innotata",
      "Kersti Nebelsiek",
      "Llywelyn2000",
      "Jcfidy",
      "Sharadapte",
      "सुबोध कुलकर्णी",
      "Manojk"
    ],
    "categories": [
      "Commons WikiProjects",
      "WikiProject Tree of Life"
    ],
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-08T01:11:58.988Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

A value the page does not provide comes back as Not Disclosed (shortcut, description) or N/A (image). Lists that are genuinely empty, such as a project without a roster, come back as [].

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
API-backed, not screen-scraped	Reads wikitext, revisions and categories through the MediaWiki API, so layout changes on the site do not break it.
One page, one row	Every WikiProject becomes exactly one row with the same 20 keys, ready for a spreadsheet or a join on pageId.
Rosters that are actually complete	Reads `{{User
Three ways in	Exact URLs, topic search, or an alphabetical listing when you give no input at all.
Polite by design	Serial requests with a delay and a descriptive User-Agent, as Wikimedia's API etiquette asks.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	What you get	What you give up
This Actor	Flat rows with rosters, status, dates and sections; search-based discovery; CSV/JSON/Excel/XML export	Media files themselves are not downloaded
Manual browsing	Full context of each page	Hours of copy-paste for a handful of projects, no dates or counts
Raw MediaWiki API calls	Everything, if you script it	Four requests per page, wikitext parsing, template and subpage handling written by you
Generic Wikipedia scrapers	Article text	No WikiProject roster or status logic, no Commons namespace support

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account; it comes with $5 of monthly credit.
2. Open the Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Scraper.
3. Keep the five example URLs or paste your own WikiProject URLs, or type search terms such as birds.
4. Set Max items (free plans return up to 10 rows as a preview) and click Start.
5. Open the Dataset tab and export as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML, or fetch it through the Apify API.

Leave both URLs and search terms empty to list WikiProjects alphabetically. Tick Include subpages if you also want pages such as Commons:WikiProject Aviation/Members as their own rows.

💼 Business use cases

🤝 GLAM partnership scouting

A museum searches paintings, architecture and photography, filters the rows to status = Active, and contacts the projects with the largest participantCount about a batch upload.

📊 Community health reporting

A Wikimedia affiliate runs the full listing monthly and charts lastEditedAt and participantCount per project to spot WikiProjects that need attention.

🗺️ Coverage mapping

An archive compares the categories and sections of every WikiProject against its own collection taxonomy to decide where its media will be found and curated.

🧑‍💻 Contributor outreach

A program coordinator merges the participants lists of related projects to build an invite list for an edit-a-thon, with createdBy and lastEditedBy as first contacts.

🔌 Automating Wikimedia Commons WikiProject Scraper

• Make / Zapier: trigger a run on a schedule and append new rows to a sheet or CRM.
• Slack: post a message when a tracked project flips from Active to Inactive.
• Airbyte: load the dataset into a warehouse and join on pageId across runs.
• GitHub Actions: run the Actor in CI and commit the CSV to a data repository.
• Google Drive: export to Excel and drop the file into a shared folder after every run.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: longitudinal studies of volunteer coordination on Commons using createdAt, lastEditedAt and roster sizes.
• Personal: find the right WikiProject to join for your hobby and see who is active there.
• Non-profit: document which topics have organized curation and which are gaps.
• Experimentation: feed description and sections into a classifier to cluster projects by scope.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Give an AI agent live access to the Actor through the Model Context Protocol:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/wikimedia-commons-wikiproject-scraper"

Then ask in plain language, for example "list the active bird-related WikiProjects on Commons with their participant counts".

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ What is a Wikimedia Commons WikiProject?

A group of contributors who organize media curation around a topic. Each project lives at Commons:WikiProject <Topic> and typically lists goals, participants, tasks and categories.

❓ Do I need a Wikimedia account or API key?

No. The Actor reads the public MediaWiki API without authentication.

❓ How do I get a specific project?

Paste its URL as a start URL. Capitalization after the first letter is forgiven: WikiProject_insects resolves to WikiProject Insects.

❓ How do search terms work?

Each term runs a Commons search restricted to WikiProject titles. Matching projects are scraped in relevance order until Max items is reached. Search terms take precedence over start URLs.

❓ Why is participants empty for some projects?

Some projects, for example WikiProject Chemistry, have no roster on the page or on a /Participants or /Members subpage. The row is still returned with participantCount: 0.

❓ What does status: Inactive mean?

The page carries a historical or inactive tag or sits in the "Inactive Commons pages" category. Everything else is reported as Active.

❓ Where does imageUrl come from?

The first [[File:...]] in the page wikitext, or the first image the page renders, turned into a direct upload.wikimedia.org URL. Pages without images return N/A.

❓ Are subpages included?

Not by default: one row is one WikiProject. Turn on Include subpages to also return pages such as Commons:WikiProject Aviation/Members from search or the listing.

❓ Does it download media files?

No. It extracts metadata and text about the project page only.

❓ Is there a rate limit?

The Actor makes three to four API calls per page in series with a short pause, in line with Wikimedia's API etiquette. Use Max items to bound the run.

❓ Can I run it on a free plan?

Yes. Free plans return up to 10 rows per run as a preview; paid plans return up to 1,000,000.

❓ What happens if a page does not exist?

That page produces a row containing only an error field with the reason; the other pages are unaffected.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Run the Actor from the Apify API or the JavaScript and Python clients, schedule it in the Apify Console, and connect the dataset to Make, Zapier, Airbyte, Google Sheets, Slack or any webhook target.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• Wikimedia Commons Category Hierarchy Scraper: walk a category tree and its subcategories.
• Wikimedia Commons Media Scraper: file metadata, licenses and download URLs.
• Wikimedia Commons Users Scraper: profiles and edit counts for the participants you find here.
• Wikimedia Commons Page History Scraper: full revision history of any page.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more data sources.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of use and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL.