Introduction

What wiki is

wiki is a command-line tool for reading Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia world. It is one pure-Go binary with no runtime dependencies. You point it at a title, a query, or a coordinate, and it renders the answer as text for you or as data for a pipeline.

It is read-only. wiki never edits, creates, or deletes anything; it has no login and stores no credentials. That keeps it safe to run anywhere and simple to reason about.

The data behind it

Wikimedia exposes its content through several public surfaces, and wiki picks the right one for each job so you do not have to:

• The MediaWiki Action API (/w/api.php) on each wiki: search, links, categories, revisions, geosearch, site statistics, and more.
• The REST API (/api/rest_v1/) on each wiki: clean page summaries, related pages, and the daily featured and on-this-day feeds.
• The Wikimedia metrics API: per-article pageview time series and the most-viewed lists.
• The Wikidata Query Service (query.wikidata.org/sparql): SPARQL over the structured knowledge graph.
• The published XML dumps (dumps.wikimedia.org): the whole encyclopedia as downloadable, streamable files.

You never choose an endpoint. You choose a command.

The mental model

Every command follows the same shape:

wiki <command> <target> [flags]

The target is usually an article title. A bare title, a title with spaces in quotes, an underscore form, or even a pasted Wikipedia URL all work, and a URL automatically selects the right wiki:

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

The wiki you talk to is English Wikipedia by default. Change the language with -l/--lang, the project with --project, or give an explicit host with --site:

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

The output is a table when you are at a terminal and JSONL when you pipe, so commands read well by eye and compose well in scripts. Switch any time with -o:

wiki search "physics" -o json
wiki links "Pi" -o url | head

Being a good citizen

wiki is polite by default. It throttles itself, retries failed requests with backoff, honours the server's Retry-After and maxlag signals, and sends a descriptive User-Agent. Responses are cached on disk so re-running a command is instant and easy on the servers. See configuration to tune any of it.

Next: install the binary.