Wikipedia Importer

Turn any Wikipedia page into a clean, fully-linked Obsidian note — in one command.

Fetches a Wikipedia article and drops it into a new or existing Note in your Vault as tidy Markdown: every Wikipedia link becomes an internal [[wikilink]], equations become Obsidian-rendered $\LaTeX$, images and animated gifs come through, sources are preserved as clickable footnotes, and most of the clutter is stripped away. What you're left with is a readable, navigable Note that plugs straight into your knowledge graph and Vault.

Why use it?

Obsidian is at its best when your notes are linked, yet building a web of knowledge by hand is slow, and simply copy-pasting from Wikipedia leaves you with broken formatting, dead links, and a wall of citation clutter.

Wikipedia Importer attempts to solve that:

• Every Wikipedia link becomes a [[wikilink]] — so an imported Wikipedia page instantly connects to everything else in your Vault, and every link becomes a doorway to the next import. (Configurable — see Link style.)
• Clean by default — navboxes, maintenance banners, fundraising notices, relative-project boxes, edit-section markers, and the sidebar formatting are all removed.
• Clean math — equations are converted to Obsidian LaTeX ($...$ and $$...$$), so they render properly instead of arriving as garbled glyphs.
• Images included, at full fidelity — content images come through as embeds at their original quality: SVG diagrams stay scalable vectors, animated gifs animate. Tiny icons, logos, license badges, and sprites are filtered out. Images are not stored locally. (Configurable — see Images.)
• True page names — a link like [[Elementary particle|fundamental constituents]] resolves to the page (Elementary particle), not the display text, so your links always point where they should.
• Sources preserved in Plaintext — the article's references are captured as plain text and tucked into a ## References section at the bottom of the import. You keep the citations for when you need them without [[ISBN]]/[[doi]] junk links polluting your graph.
• In-text citations that actually link — reference markers appear in the body as footnotes ([^1]) that jump straight to the source below, exactly like Wikipedia. Where a citation has a URL, the footnote carries an external [source] link too.
• Automatic tags — Notes are tagged from Wikipedia's own categories the moment they land, so your imports organize themselves. Add your own tags as well, or turn auto-tagging off entirely.

Recommended workflow (can be done from a blank Vault)

(Note: You must have [[wikilinks]] enabled for this workflow to occur.)

Link-Walking:

1. Run the Wikipedia Importer: Import Wikipedia page by title command to create a new Note with the imported content.
2. In the Note, find any [[wikilink]] that doesn't have a Note yet.
3. Left-click on the link, so that Obsidian creates the (empty) Note and opens it.
4. Run the command Wikipedia Importer: Import Wikipedia page matching current note title.
5. The empty Note will be filled with that Wikipedia page's content — complete with its links.
6. Click any [[wikilink]], and continue creating new notes with the aforementioned commands.

Each import opens dozens (or perhaps hundreds or even thousands!) of new connections. You can follow any thread: e.g., — Physics → Quantum mechanics → Wave–particle duality → … — building a rich and interconnected weave throughout your Vault as you read — all without ever leaving Obsidian or typing a page name.

Tip: Bind that command to a hotkey (Settings → Hotkeys → search "Wikipedia Importer") and the whole loop becomes: Left-click a link, tap your hotkey, import, repeat.

Commands

Open the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P) and search "Wikipedia Importer":

Settings

General

Links & images

Tags

Installation

Automatic (Simplest)

1. Open Settings in Obsidian.
2. Navigate to Community Plugins (ensure they are enabled).
3. Click Browse, and search for Wikipedia Importer by Concomitant.
4. Install and Enable the plugin.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from this repository's latest release.
2. In your vault, create the folder: .obsidian/plugins/wikipedia-importer/
3. Put all three files inside it.
4. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins, enable community plugins if needed, then toggle on Wikipedia Importer, and adjust settings accordingly.

Troubleshoot Step: New plugin folders aren't auto-detected — restart Obsidian, Disable and then Enable the plugin, or toggle Community plugins off/on so it appears.

Build it yourself

Requires Node.js (LTS).

1. Clone or download this repository into .obsidian/plugins/wikipedia-importer/.
2. Open a terminal in that folder.
3. Run npm install (once), then npm run build (might take a few moments).
4. Enable the plugin in Obsidian.

Use npm run dev to rebuild automatically as you edit the source.

Good to know

• Content-focused workflow: The goal is a clean reading and clean linking Note, not a perfect copy of the Wikipedia page. Some formatting and navigation tools are intentionally dropped.
• Math renders in Reading/Live Preview. In raw Source mode you'll likely see the $$...$$ markup as plain text — try switching views if it's garbled, and submit a ticket if it's broken math.
• Footnotes render in Reading/Live Preview too. The [^1] markers become clickable superscripts that jump to the citation at the bottom of the Note.
• A note on large graphs. Importing densely-linked pages (and their neighbors) creates a LOT of links, which Obsidian's graph view and backlinks panel have to render. If things feel sluggish during heavy importing, closing the graph view and turning off "backlinks in document" helps immensely — the slowdown is Obsidian indexing the links, not the import itself.

How it works (under the hood)

The plugin calls Wikipedia's public API for the rendered HTML of a page (no API key needed), walks the resulting document, and converts it element by element: anchors pointing at /wiki/... become wikilinks, <math> elements are unwrapped to their underlying $\LaTeX$, content tables become Markdown tables, reference markers become linked footnotes, and a set of known-clutter containers (navboxes, infoboxes, maintenance banners, relative-project boxes, montages) are removed. The article's categories are pulled in the same call to power automatic tag creation. The result is written into your Vault according to your Note destination, naming, link, image, and tag settings.

Built with a lot of iteration, for anyone who wants Wikipedia's knowledge web living inside their own.

Built with Claude (Opus 4.8)