Reading articles

Render any article as text, Markdown, HTML, wikitext, or a summary, by section or revision, for reading or for pipelines.

Reading is the heart of wiki. There are two commands: read for humans and get for pipelines. They share the same rendering flags.

read vs get

wiki read is built for a terminal. It renders clean plain text by default and pages it through $PAGER (or less):

wiki read "Alan Turing"

wiki get is the scriptable sibling. It never pages, writes straight to stdout, and reads titles on stdin with -:

wiki get "Alan Turing" --text | wc -w
wiki get "Pi" --html > pi.html

Choosing the form

Both commands take the same flags to pick what you get back:

Flag	What you get
`--text`	Clean plain text (the default)
`--markdown`, `-m`	Markdown with headings, links, and emphasis
`--html`	The server-rendered article HTML
`--wikitext`	The raw wikitext source
`--summary`	A one-paragraph summary
`--lead`	The lead section only, as text
`--section N`	Only section index `N`
`--rev ID`	A specific revision's content

wiki read "Go (programming language)" --markdown
wiki read "Pi" --lead
wiki read "Pi" --section 2
wiki get "Cat" --rev 123456789 --wikitext

Summaries

wiki summary is a shortcut for the one-paragraph extract, printed plain for reading and as structured data in a pipe:

wiki summary "Quantum computing"
wiki summary "Quantum computing" -o json

Targets: titles and URLs

The argument can be a bare title, a quoted title with spaces, an underscore form, or a pasted Wikipedia URL. A URL selects the right wiki automatically:

wiki read "Alan Turing"
wiki read Alan_Turing
wiki read https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin

Other languages and projects

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

Open in the browser

When you would rather read on the web:

wiki open "Alan Turing"           # open in your default browser
wiki open "Alan Turing" --print   # just print the URL

Pipelines

Because get reads stdin and emits structured data, search results flow straight in:

wiki search "turing" -n 5 -o jsonl | wiki get - --summary

See output formats for everything you can do with -o.