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wiki

Wikipedia, from the command line

wiki is a single pure-Go binary that puts Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia world behind a tool that feels like curl. Read an article, search the full text, pull a summary, walk links and categories, query Wikidata with SPARQL, fetch pageview metrics, and stream the XML dumps, with no account and nothing to pay for.

Get started View on GitHub

Working with Wikipedia from a script usually means juggling the MediaWiki Action API, the REST endpoints, the Wikidata Query Service, and a pile of glue code. wiki puts all of it behind one tool with sensible defaults, real output formats, and pipelines that compose.

wiki read "Alan Turing"               # the readable article in your pager
wiki search "turing machine" -o url   # every matching title as a URL
wiki summary "Quantum computing"      # a one-paragraph summary
wiki entity Q937                       # the Wikidata entity for Einstein

It speaks to the public Wikimedia hosts over plain HTTPS, so there is nothing to sign up for. The binary is pure Go with no runtime dependencies, and it is a polite client out of the box: self-throttling, retrying with backoff, honouring Retry-After and maxlag, and caching responses on disk.

What you can do with it

  • Read articles. wiki read renders clean plain text or Markdown, the server HTML, the raw wikitext, or a summary, and pages it for you. wiki get is the scriptable sibling that never pages and reads titles on stdin.
  • Search and discover. Full-text search with CirrusSearch operators, prefix suggest, random articles, and related pages.
  • Walk the structure. List a page's links, backlinks, categories, media, and references, find the same article in other langs, and read its info.
  • Follow the history. Page revisions and a unified diff between any two.
  • Browse feeds and metrics. The featured feed, onthisday events, the most-viewed top list, and a pageviews time series.
  • Map and link. geosearch near a coordinate, nearby an article, and Wikidata entity and sparql queries.
  • Go bulk. dump the public XML archives with resume, sha1 verification, and constant-memory streaming.

Where to go next

  • New here? Start with the introduction for the mental model, then the quick start.
  • Want to install it? See installation.
  • Looking for a specific task? The guides cover reading, searching, page structure, history, feeds and metrics, geo, Wikidata, and dumps.
  • Need every flag? The CLI reference is the full surface.
Getting started Install wiki and read your first article from Wikipedia in under a minute. Guides Task-focused walkthroughs for reading, searching, page structure, history, feeds and metrics, geo, Wikidata, and the XML dumps. Reference The complete command surface, configuration, output formats, and troubleshooting.