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Wikimedia telnet interface

meta.wikimedia.org

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Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#31

Post by kps »

CaptSpify wrote: post #16
lucb1e wrote: post #5

The 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.

No need to reinvent the wheel — topic/conversation sites like HN should just support RFC3977, while things like wikipedia can use RFC1436 (although a MIME typing extension is sorely needed).

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#32

Post by ComputerGuru »

It's case sensitive :-(

That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason?

I wish it had search.

    >>> easybcd
    easybcd
    Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you.
    No worries. There are lots of other pages to read.
    Pick a different title.


    >>> Easybcd
    Easybcd
    Sorry! Could not fetch "Easybcd" for you.
    No worries. There are lots of other pages to read.
    Pick a different title.


    >>> EasyBCD
    EasyBCD
    EasyBCD

    EasyBCD ist ein Programm, das von NeoSmart Technologies entwickelt wurde.
    Es wird zum Konfigurieren und Anpassen des von Microsoft entwickelten
    Bootloaders Bootmgr verwendet, der Teil der Boot Configuration Data (BCD)
    der Windows-Versionen Windows Vista und jünger ist. EasyBCD kann benutzt
    werden, um eine Multi-Boot-Konfiguration zwischen diesen und vorhergehenden
    Versionen von Windows, sowie Linux, BSD und Mac OS X zu erstellen.
    ....

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#33

Post by yrro »

Out of interest, is it possible to set up an anonymous service with SSH? Or would it rely on configuring an SSH server to accept any user-provided credentials?

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#35

Post by cscottnet »

cscottnet wrote: post #34

See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway for technical details. The technology behind this is used for Wikipedia's Visual Editor, PDF export, and plain text export, so it is very likely to be supported if enough folks find it useful.

Oh -- and report bugs/feature requests at https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet/issues please. Patches are even better.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#36

Post by dingaling »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #32

It's case sensitive :-( That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason? I wish it had search. >>> easybcd easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you. N…

> It's case sensitive :-(

Also IP-protocol sensitive :(

  $telnet -6 telnet.wmflabs.org
  telnet: could not resolve telnet.wmflabs.org/telnet: Name or service not known
No AAAA RR.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#37

Post by simcop2387 »

jxy wrote: post #21

I almost skipped it, but I tried anyway. Wonderful! I like the wiktionary: use en.wiktionary.org Feels dictd on steroids. Somehow I got disconnected frequently. Is it intentional? Or is it just my company's network hate telnet?

It's quite possibly because they're getting a lot of traffic. As people are realizing that it's actually functional I'm sure they've got more telnet connections than all the MUDs in the world combined.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#39

Post by digi_owl »

zeveb wrote: post #26

What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware".

Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher.

I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the same information.

Re: Wikimedia telnet interface

#40

Post by nickpsecurity »

Great stuff! A bit like the old BBS days albeit not as great an interface. Someone with a sniffer should see what traffic size is during article load on Telnet vs web version w/ cache cleared. I'm curious if it's more or less efficient.

On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal ("green screen") and web apps had interesting things to say.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/openvms_notes_my_OpenV...

In paradigm changes section, they pointed out they had been doing textual apps because they were easy, worked, and ran really fast. They apparently supported tons of users on a few VMS boxes that way. Hardly any company was interested unless they had a web interface. Switching to Web made the services 2-5x slower, necessitating hardware and software upgrades. They also had security troubles. Business is booming, though.

Lots of lessons to be learned. Old way was fast but harder to use and inflexible. Web is easier interface but slow and insecure. I still think client-server w/ minimal GUI's (eg REBOL) w/ efficient protocol is best middle ground.

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