April fools joke aside, I'd actually use this, but it doesn't seem to fully work. Most articles would not resolve for me and welcome page was joke content.
Try typing "use en.wikipedia.org" first.
Wikimedia telnet interface
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#12I'm actually incredibly disappointed that this isn't a thing. I had a screensaver that would curl a random wikipedia page and display it - but it always looked like hot garbage, due to a bunch of extraneous stuff that I didn't want to bother filtering out. This would have been pretty great. :/
Have you not tried it? It's working great!
EDIT: With the exception of the connection being closed on the Wikipedia end relatively often.
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#13The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool's thing. Besides images, I might actually totally love using Wikipedia from the command line. It would fit in well with my general command line usage. The Tor feature is particularly cool. (Just to be clear, this post is not a joke. I actually use a terminal all day for various tasks so it might fit in well.)
It might have been set up as an April Fool's joke, but it is also a real thing that works.
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#14Cool. I would use this quite often.
I hope https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet gets more contributor love now. Especially a pager would dearly be needed.
I vividly remember the telnet interface to the library system at my university. It was easy to use and fast. There were even some old terminals you could use (my only real exposure to real terminals).
Then they replaced it with a slow html page. :-(
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#15Joke or not, this is awesome! I could imagine using quite a few apps in the terminal like time tracking or chat. It feels so much quicker and quite frankly when browsing the web a lot of pages are visually heavy and chaotic that I fall back to the Safari reader mode very often anyway.
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#16The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool's thing. Besides images, I might actually totally love using Wikipedia from the command line. It would fit in well with my general command line usage. The Tor feature is particularly cool. (Just to be clear, this post is not a joke. I actually use a terminal all day for various tasks so it might fit in well.)
There are so many sites that I would love to see implement cli interfaces for. HN is one. tldp.org, die.net, etc.
I'm sure many of them have a lynx-useable page, but having a standardized cli interface to these would be super-useful to me as well.
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#17Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.
>>> import requests, bs4
>>> def summary(name):
... resp = requests.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{0}".format(name))
... return bs4.BeautifulSoup(resp.text).p.get_text()
...
>>> summary("Hacker news")
'Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham\'s investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one\'s intellectual curiosity".[1]'Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#18This is really nice for those of us who run vintage computers (e.g. Apple II) with ethernet adapters. I hope they keep this around.
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#19[deleted]
Re: Wikimedia telnet interface
#20Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.
I was hoping that telnet was making a comeback. It feels like an old friend.