wikipedia-cli

wiki

A command line for Wikipedia. wiki reads public Wikipedia and Wikimedia data and prints clean, pipeable records. One pure-Go binary, no API key, no login.

Install • Commands • Usage • Resource URIs

It talks to the public Wikimedia APIs over plain HTTPS. Every request is paced, retried on transient failures, and sent with an honest User-Agent. Responses are cached on disk so re-running a command is instant and easy on the servers.

wiki is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Article content is licensed by its authors under CC BY-SA 4.0; please respect the Wikimedia API etiquette and attribute your sources.

Install

go install github.com/tamnd/wikipedia-cli/cmd/wiki@latest

Or grab a prebuilt binary from the releases, or run the container image:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/wiki:latest read "Alan Turing"

Shell completion is built in: wiki completion bash|zsh|fish|powershell.

Commands

Full reference and guides live at wikipedia-cli.tamnd.com.

Usage

wiki read "Alan Turing"
wiki search "turing machine"
wiki summary "Quantum computing"
wiki info "Mars"
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'
wiki geosearch 51.5074,-0.1278 --radius 1000
wiki dump list --wiki dewiki

Records come out as a list (the default on a terminal), table, markdown, JSON, JSONL, CSV, TSV, url, or raw. The output is colored on a terminal and a progress spinner marks slow reads; pipe it and the bytes are plain:

wiki info "Mars" -o table
wiki search "physics" -n 10 --fields title,description -o csv
wiki links "Alan Turing" -o url | head
wiki revisions "Climate change" --user Jimbo -o jsonl
wiki search "quantum" -n 5 -o jsonl | jq .title

Switch wikis with -l/--lang, --project, or --site. A pasted URL picks the right wiki automatically:

wiki read "Berlin" -l de                        # German Wikipedia
wiki search "café" --project wiktionary -l fr   # French Wiktionary
wiki read https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin  # URL auto-selects

Global flags

-o, --output      list|table|markdown|json|jsonl|csv|tsv|url|raw   (auto: list on a TTY, jsonl when piped)
    --fields      comma-separated columns to include
    --no-header   omit the heading in list, or the header row in csv/tsv/markdown
    --template    Go text/template applied per record
-n, --limit       max records (0 = command default)
-l, --lang        wiki language subdomain (default en)
    --project     Wikimedia project (default wikipedia)
    --site        explicit wiki host; overrides --lang and --project
-q, --quiet       suppress the progress spinner
    --color       auto|always|never  (color on a terminal, off when piped)
    --rate        min spacing between requests (default 150ms)
    --timeout     per-request timeout (default 1m)
    --retries     retry attempts on 429/5xx (default 4)
    --no-cache    bypass the on-disk response cache
    --ua          override the User-Agent

Exit codes

0  success, at least one record
1  error
2  usage error
3  no results (a valid empty response)
4  not found (the article or entity does not exist)

Use it as a resource-URI driver

The wiki package ships a driver that makes Wikipedia pages addressable as resource URIs, the way a database driver registers with database/sql. A host program such as ant blank-imports the package:

import _ "github.com/tamnd/wikipedia-cli/wiki"

Then ant (or any program that links the package) dereferences wikipedia:// URIs:

ant get wikipedia://page/Alan_Turing       # the article summary
ant cat wikipedia://page/Alan_Turing       # just the extract text
ant ls  wikipedia://page/Alan_Turing       # the articles it links to
ant ls  wikipedia://category/Computability # the articles in a category
ant url wikipedia://page/Alan_Turing       # back to the live URL

Every listed link and category member is itself a wikipedia://page/ URI, so a host can walk the graph. See the driver guide for the record shapes and the full URI grammar.

Development

cmd/wiki/    thin main entry point
cli/         cobra commands, output rendering, and the progress spinner
wiki/        HTTP client, API calls, models, and the wikipedia:// driver
docs/        documentation site (Hugo, tago-doks theme)

make build   # ./bin/wiki
make test    # go test ./...
make vet     # go vet ./...

Requires Go 1.26+.

Releasing

Push a version tag and GitHub Actions runs GoReleaser, which builds the archives, Linux packages, the multi-arch GHCR image, checksums, SBOMs, and a cosign signature:

git tag -a v0.3.0 -m "v0.3.0"
git push --tags

The image tag carries no v prefix (ghcr.io/tamnd/wiki:0.3.0).

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.