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MCP SERVER

Wikipedia Simple English MCP Server

by bhubbb ↗

Wikipedia with Simple English tried first and regular English as the fallback — search, summary or the full article, with the language it used reported back.

Encyclopedic & Cultural Reference
Summary
The 500-character threshold is what makes the fallback useful.

Preferring Simple English would be a liability if it meant getting a two-sentence stub instead of a real article. Checking the length first means you get the clearer version when there is one and the complete version when there is not, and the response tells you which you got. The mode switch is the escape hatch: leave it on simple for explanations and general reading, set it to full when the topic is technical enough that simplification loses the content.

What it is

An MCP server over Wikipedia that prefers Simple English and falls back to regular English when the simple version is missing or too thin. The fallback is quality-based, not just existence-based: if the Simple English article is under 500 characters it is treated as a stub and the English one is fetched instead.

What you get
  • A search across Wikipedia returning ranked article titles with metadata, capped by a limit between 1 and 20 that defaults to 10 — `search`
  • A page summary for quick answers, with the title, Wikipedia version, language code, URL and content length in the metadata block — `summary`
  • The complete article text when a summary is not enough, with the same metadata alongside it — `content`
  • Disambiguation handled rather than guessed: when several pages match, the options come back as a list to choose from
  • Auto-suggest on titles by default, so a near-miss title still resolves
  • Structured responses that separate metadata from content, so the answer says which Wikipedia version and language it actually came from
Requirements

No account and no key — it reads public Wikipedia. Python 3.12 or higher and the `uv` package manager; run straight from the repository with `uvx git+https://github.com/bhubbb/mcp-se-wikipedia`, or clone and `uv sync`. The package is `mcp-se-wikipedia` (0.1.0 in pyproject) over stdio. One environment variable changes the behaviour: `WIKIPEDIA_MODE` defaults to `simple`, and setting it to `full` bypasses Simple English entirely — worth doing when you need technical depth rather than clarity.

Setup effort

One command — uvx git+https://github.com/bhubbb/mcp-se-wikipedia