Wikipedia to Markdown
Turn any Wikipedia article into clean, AI-ready Markdown — structure intact, page furniture gone.
How to convert a Wikipedia article to Markdown
- Install the free Web2MD extension, then open the Wikipedia article you want — any language edition works, and so do the thousands of other wikis running MediaWiki.
- Click the Web2MD icon (or press Alt+M). Web2MD reads the article from the page you already have open and keeps the heading hierarchy, so a long article stays navigable instead of collapsing into one block of text.
- Copy the Markdown or send it straight to ChatGPT or Claude. The article title becomes the top-level heading and the source URL is kept, so the material stays attributable.
Why convert Wikipedia articles to Markdown?
Selecting a Wikipedia article and copying it drags along everything that is not the article: an [edit] link beside every single heading, the contents sidebar, the 'jump to navigation' anchors, and the maintenance banners at the top. Web2MD removes that furniture — on a typical article it is about a tenth of the text — while leaving every heading in place.
The structure is the part worth keeping. Wikipedia articles are carefully sectioned, and those sections are what let you ask a model about one specific part — the etymology, the reception, the third paragraph of the history. Markdown preserves that hierarchy as real headings rather than as visual styling that disappears on copy.
The reference list survives too. Stripping an article down to prose is easy; the harder thing is keeping it checkable. Web2MD keeps the references at the bottom intact, so a claim you paste into a model can still be traced back to where it came from.
Wikipedia to Markdown — FAQ
What happens to the citations and reference list?
The reference list at the bottom of the article is kept — it is genuinely useful content, and dropping it would make the export impossible to verify. Inline superscript markers in the body are removed, since to an AI model they are noise rather than information.
Do tables and infoboxes convert properly?
Ordinary article tables convert to Markdown tables and hold their structure. Infoboxes are a harder case — they are visually a table but semantically a stack of key-value pairs, and complex ones with nested images or spanning cells can come out flattened. Check the result if an infobox is the part you actually need.
Does it work on non-English Wikipedia and other wikis?
Yes. Every language edition uses the same underlying page structure, so Japanese, German, Chinese and the rest convert the same way, including right-to-left editions such as Arabic and Hebrew. The same cleanup applies to other MediaWiki sites — Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Fandom wikis and most self-hosted company wikis.
Is it free?
Yes for everyday use. The free plan covers regular conversions; paid plans exist for heavy batch work.
Converting an ordinary web page instead? Use the website to Markdown converter. For video transcripts, try YouTube to Markdown. Site-specific guides live in the convert hub.