How to Scrape Wikipedia With Python | Web Scraping Tutorial
Want to collect structured data from Wikipedia? This tutorial shows how to scrape Wikipedia articles with Python by extracting infobox data, tables, and article content, then saving everything as JSON, CSV, and Markdown files.
🔗 How to scrape Wikipedia with Python:
1. Create a project folder and place wikipedia.py inside it.
2. Navigate to the folder and create a virtual environment.
3. Install dependencies using the virtual environment's Python.
4. Extract infobox data from the article sidebar and save it as JSON.
5. Find and export all Wikipedia data tables as individual CSV files.
6. Clean the article body by removing navigation boxes, references, and other non-content elements.
7. Convert the cleaned HTML to Markdown using html2text and save it to file.
💡 Why use residential proxies?
Residential proxies help prevent IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, and other anti-bot obstacles when scraping at scale. Decodo provides access to 115M+ residential IPs across 195+ locations, with a less 0.6s response time and a 99.95% success rate.
🚀 Try Decodo residential proxies for free: https://dashboard.decodo.com/resident...
📄 Get the full code: https://decodo.com/blog/scraping-wiki...
👉 Tools used:
Python
Requests
Beautiful Soup
lxml
html2text
Pandas
Decodo residential proxies
What you'll learn:
✔️ Set up a Python virtual environment for a scraping projects
✔️ Add retry logic and user-agent rotation
✔️ Extract Wikipedia infobox data as JSON
✔️ Export Wikipedia tables to CSV with Pandas
✔️ Remove noisy elements before parsing
✔️ Convert article HTML into clean Markdown
🔗 Helpful resources:
Python installation: https://www.python.org/downloads
Decodo documentation: http://help.decodo.com
FAQs:
❓What can you do with scraped Wikipedia data?
Common use cases include building training datasets for AI models, populating knowledge bases, extracting structured company or biographical data at scale, and running text analysis across large numbers of articles.
❓Do I need proxies to scrape Wikipedia?
For light scraping of individual pages, proxies aren't required. But if you're collecting data across thousands of pages, rotating residential proxies help avoid rate limits and keep your requests looking like regular traffic.
❓Why use html2text instead of just saving the HTML?
HTML carries a lot of noise (tags, scripts, inline styles) that you don't want if you're feeding text into a language model or building a searchable document store. The html2text library gives you a clean, readable version of the content that's much easier to work with downstream.
❓Can I scrape multiple Wikipedia pages at once?
Yes, you can extend the script by looping through a list of URLs and calling scrape_page() on each one. Add a short delay between requests to stay within Wikipedia's rate limits.
Let's connect on other platforms!
🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/decodo
🔹 Discord community: discord.gg/gvJhWJPaB4
🔹 GitHub: github.com/decodo
Need some direct support?
🔹 For sales queries, email: sales@decodo.com
🔹 24/7 tech support: https://direct.lc.chat/12092754
On this page of the site you can watch the video online How to Scrape Wikipedia With Python | Web Scraping Tutorial with a duration of online in good quality, which was uploaded by the user Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) 05 March 2026, share the link with friends and acquaintances, this video has already been watched 201 times on youtube and it was liked by 5 viewers. Enjoy your viewing!
