wikipedia-cli

wiki

A fast, friendly command line for Wikipedia.

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 as clean text or Markdown, search the full text, pull a one-paragraph summary, walk links, categories, media and references, follow revisions and diffs, query Wikidata with SPARQL, fetch pageview metrics, browse the daily and on-this-day feeds, find articles near a coordinate, and stream the public XML dumps, all with no account and nothing to pay for.

wiki read "Alan Turing"               # read the article in your pager
wiki search "turing machine"          # full-text search
wiki get "Pi" --text | wc -w          # the article text, for pipelines
wiki summary "Quantum computing"      # a one-paragraph summary

It talks to the public Wikimedia APIs over plain HTTPS and is a polite client by default: it rate-limits itself, retries with backoff, honours Retry-After and maxlag, sends a descriptive User-Agent, and caches responses on disk. The binary is pure Go with no runtime dependencies and no CGO.

Install

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

# Homebrew (once the tap is published)
brew install tamnd/tap/wiki

# Docker
docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/wiki read "Alan Turing"

Release archives, .deb/.rpm/.apk packages, a Scoop manifest, checksums, SBOMs and a cosign signature are attached to every GitHub release.

What you can do with it

• Read. wiki read renders an article as paged plain text by default, or --markdown, --html, --wikitext, or --summary. wiki get is the scriptable, never-paged sibling for pipelines.
• Search & discover. Full-text search (CirrusSearch operators pass through), prefix suggest, random, and related pages.
• Walk structure. links, backlinks, categories, category members, media, references, langs (interlanguage links), info, and cite.
• Follow history. revisions and a unified diff between any two revisions.
• Browse feeds. featured (today's featured article, most-read, picture of the day, in the news), onthisday, and the most-viewed top list.
• Measure. pageviews time series for an article and the stats for a whole wiki.
• Map. geosearch near a coordinate and nearby an article.
• Query Wikidata. entity lookups and raw sparql against the Query Service.
• Go bulk. dump list/download/pages/grep over the public XML dumps, with resume, sha1 verification, and constant-memory streaming.
• Go offline. dump export turns a whole dump into a corpus of clean Markdown (or text), one file per article, parsing wikitext and keeping code blocks, headings, and links while dropping template and reference chrome.

Every command shares one output contract: a readable list (the default on a terminal), table, markdown, json, jsonl (the default in a pipe), csv, tsv, url, and Go --template. On a terminal the output is colored and a small spinner marks a slow read while it waits on the network; pipe it and the spinner is gone and the bytes are plain. Pick columns with --fields, cap results with -n, and target any wiki with -l/--lang, --project, or --site.

Multiple wikis

wiki read "Berlin" -l de                       # German Wikipedia
wiki search "café" --project wiktionary -l fr  # French Wiktionary
wiki entity Q937                               # Wikidata
wiki read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat    # a pasted URL just works

Use it as a resource-URI driver

The wiki package also ships a small driver that makes Wikipedia addressable as a resource URI, the way a database driver registers with database/sql. A host program such as ant blank-imports the package and gets wikipedia:// URIs for free:

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

With the driver mounted, a page is a URI you can dereference, list, and follow:

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

The driver speaks the default English Wikipedia, where a bare title is unambiguous; the wiki binary is still the way to reach another language or project. 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.

Documentation

Full docs live at https://wikipedia-cli.tamnd.com. Start with the introduction and the quick start, or jump to the CLI reference.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/tamnd/wikipedia-cli
cd wikipedia-cli
make build          # builds ./bin/wiki
make test

Requires Go 1.26+.

License

Apache-2.0.

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