books

Wikisource

Wikimedia's library of free-content source texts, transcribed books, documents, speeches, and historical material, running to millions of pages. You can search it through the standard MediaWiki API or on the website. It is useful for finding transcribed, citable full texts of public-domain and primary-source documents.

Books API

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Why it’s useful & how it works

Wikisource is the best place to find a fully transcribed, citable version of a classic text that you need to quote or link to: all content has been proofread by volunteers and is freely licensed. It holds primary sources across many fields, from foundational legal documents and speeches to novels and scientific papers. You search via the website or the MediaWiki API by title or keyword, and results open as clean, printable web pages that can also be exported as ebooks.

What’s inside

Millions of transcribed pages across 85 language editions, covering literature, law, history, science, and government documents from antiquity to the early 20th century.

API access

https://en.wikisource.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=...&format=json

What we measured

Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.

Reachability

Direct request: Responded HTTP 200 399 ms
Through a datacenter proxy: Responded HTTP 200 1.5 s
API, direct: Responded HTTP 200 296 ms
API, through a proxy: Responded HTTP 200 2.4 s

Did a real search return anything?

Returned results · 40815 results for the sample query · median 782 ms · stable across runs

Sample query: Liberty

Benchmark coverage

Found 8 of 8 test items (100%) in the Books cluster. Median response 277 ms.

By how well known the item is: 3/3 well-known, 3/3 mid, 2/2 obscure .

One item it found: Frankenstein

Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.