How to Download a Wikipedia Article for Offline Use

Copy paste isn't enough

Selecting a Wikipedia page and pasting it into a document usually drags along infobox tables, footnote numbers, "[edit]" links, and stray navigation text. Cleaning that up by hand takes longer than reading the article itself.

The Wikipedia article extractor fetches the article straight from its URL and gives you the content in a format meant to be reused, not a snapshot of the page's layout.

Pick the format for what you're actually doing

• Reading offline on a plane or during a commute: PDF.
• Pasting into notes, a wiki, or a markdown editor: Markdown.
• Dropping into a script or a search index: plain text or the JSON AST.
• Need the exact source markup, templates and all: raw wikitext.

There's no single "best" format here, it depends on where the content is going next.

Getting the article

1. Paste the article's URL, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog.
2. Click "Fetch article".
3. Choose a format from the dropdown: plain text, Markdown, HTML, raw wikitext, AST (JSON), or PDF.
4. Toggle which parts to keep: headings, lists, tables, links, references, images, templates, categories.
5. Download the result, or copy it straight out of the viewer.

The URL is also how the tool knows the language. Paste a link from de.wikipedia.org or ja.wikipedia.org and it fetches that language edition, no separate setting needed.