Quick start

This page takes you from a fresh install to a working pipeline in a few minutes. Nothing here needs an account.

Read an article

wiki read "Alan Turing"

The article opens in your pager as clean plain text. Press q to quit. Want Markdown instead?

wiki read "Alan Turing" --markdown

Other forms are a flag away: --html, --wikitext, --summary, --lead (the intro only), and --section N.

Get a summary

wiki summary "Quantum computing"

One clean paragraph, the same one Wikipedia shows in its preview cards.

Search

wiki search "turing machine"

You get a table of matching titles with a snippet. CirrusSearch operators pass straight through:

wiki search "incategory:Physics quantum"
wiki search "intitle:learning insource:python"

Switch wikis

wiki summary "Berlin" -l de                    # German Wikipedia
wiki read "café" --project wiktionary -l fr    # French Wiktionary

A pasted URL picks the wiki for you:

wiki read https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris

Compose a pipeline

Output is JSONL when piped, so commands chain naturally. Search, then fetch the summary of each hit:

wiki search "climate change" -n 5 -o jsonl | wiki get - --summary

Just want URLs?

wiki links "Alan Turing" -o url | head

Pull a column with --fields and feed it to anything:

wiki search "physics" -n 10 --fields title -o csv

Look something up in Wikidata

wiki entity Q937 --props P569,P570        # Einstein's birth and death dates
wiki sparql 'SELECT ?c ?p WHERE { ?c wdt:P31 wd:Q515; wdt:P1082 ?p } ORDER BY DESC(?p) LIMIT 5'

Where to go next

• The guides walk through each area in depth: reading, searching, page structure, history, feeds and metrics, geo, Wikidata, and dumps.
• The CLI reference lists every command and flag.
• Output formats explains tables, JSON, CSV, URLs, and templates.