Wikimedia Commons
Cultural heritage items for Worldwide. Access: Public API. Terms checked November 2, 2026.
Access and terms
| Slug | wikimedia-commons |
|---|---|
| Records | Cultural heritage items |
| Places | Worldwide |
| Years | Not stated by the source |
| Access | Public API |
| Key | Not needed. |
| Rate limit | No fixed figure for reads: make requests in series, send a User-Agent with contact details, use maxlag, and back off on 429 or Retry-After (API:Etiquette and the Wikimedia API rate limits page). |
| robots.txt | Disallows the path for crawlers. See the notes. |
| Homepage | commons.wikimedia.org/ |
| API docs | www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Etiquette |
| Terms | foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Wikimedia_Foundation_User-Agent_Policy |
| Checked by hand | November 2, 2026 |
Notes
Paintings, maps and prints with a license on every file page (extmetadata LicenseShortName and Artist through prop=imageinfo). Example: the Trumbull Surrender of General Burgoyne is on Commons. robots.txt disallows /w/ for crawlers, which covers /w/api.php; the API pages invite API use, so Lineage calls the API and never crawls pages. Every image is stored with its license and captioned "context, not a portrait".
Evidence read on November 2, 2026
Status: Live
Live at the last check, 2026-11-03 03:49 UTC. HTTP 200 in 156 ms. One check a day.
JSON: /v1/sources/wikimedia-commons. For agents: /sources/wikimedia-commons/llms.txt.