Wikimedia telnet interface (opens in new tab)

(meta.wikimedia.org)

115 points_joe9y ago70 comments

70 comments

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.)

wjoe9y ago

It might have been set up as an April Fool's joke, but it is also a real thing that works.

SilasX9y ago

A lot of viable products came out that way. Gmail, I think.

Edit: Looks like it wasn't intended as a joke, but was initially received that way because of the timing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Public_releas...

CaptSpify9y ago

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.

kps9y ago

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).

ksherlock9y ago

You could look into links/elinks for a command line browser. Or WikipediaFS (http://wikipediafs.sourceforge.net)

SilasX9y ago

Why not for images too? There are lots of good image-to-ascii art converters.

"We don't just support thin clients; we support anorexic ones!"

_toastie9y ago

Yeah, 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.

okasaki9y ago

    >>> 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]'

organsnyder9y ago

It may be a joke, but it actually works:

$ telnet telnet.wmflabs.org Trying 208.80.155.160... Connected to telnet.wmflabs.org. Escape character is '^]'.

(I had some more text pasted here, but it didn't format well on HN)

I've tried a few queries, and it seems to work. Though I did just get an article in French for some reason...

mtdewcmu9y ago

I was hoping that telnet was making a comeback. It feels like an old friend.

arca_vorago9y ago

Its called ssh. Telnet is pretty much dead to me.

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tyingq9y ago

html2text and a bash function seem to do okay.

  $ sudo apt-get install html2text

  $ function lookup() {curl -sL http://wikipedia.com/wiki/$1|html2text -ascii|less;}

  $ lookup node.js

Edit: Replace spaces with underscores for multi word lookups, like George_Washington. Or fix the function.

zeveb9y ago

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.

digi_owl9y ago

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.

cesarbs9y ago

> It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

Spot on. I find myself frequently and increasingly frustrated with how slow most software is nowadays. Every app in my phone takes 2-3 seconds to load. Lots of websites/webapps take several seconds to load before they are readable/usable (Google Sheets is particularly offensive here).

Years ago I had a lot less hardware than today, and the software I use had less features, but I remember response times being much faster. I hope we're able to reverse this situation soon.

dorfsmay9y ago

Graphics are no longer the issue. The issue these days is that your browser has to download an entire is apps with all it's dependencies before it can start rendering the few KB of text.

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dmd9y ago

I know people (mostly under 25) who look at a text document like that and complain "why isn't this a YouTube? I don't want to read shit"

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bhaak9y ago

Cool. 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. :-(

halotrope9y ago

Joke 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.

tangue9y ago

Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

halotrope9y ago

Never got along with emacs. More of a vim person. I might misjudge of ignorance but emacs seems too heavy and complicated and this do it all attitude hits my as not very unixy.

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nickpsecurity9y ago

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.

salgernon9y ago

I keep reposting this comment, but whenever telnet is mentioned (fun simulation of 1980s):

telnet telehack.com .... . usenet

I with they had trn installed.

nickpsecurity9y ago

Naturally I did some googling on "telehack" before typing it into the terminal. ;) So, I run it and see some familiar things. Talking to Eliza is a trap. I try StarWars expecting a banner or game. What I find... the movie rendered as text art... is awesome. The level of detail and compromises they made were great.

Thanks for the link as I'm sure I'll find more interesting stuff on here. :)

d-crane9y ago

Huge telehack fan here, glad to see it get mentioned -- this immediately reminded me of TH.

ComputerGuru9y ago

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.
    ....

cgriswald9y ago

Interestingly, the first character doesn't seem to matter. "easyBCD" and "EasyBCD" return the same results. And for some things all lower case appears to work:

"USB", "uSB", "usb", "Usb" all work, "usB" does not. I agree that case sensitivity is pointless here.

> and then it gave me the German version for some reason?

It probably associated your location with Germany. It gave me the English version.

Try:

:use en.wikipedia.org

> I wish it had search.

My first lookup (which I've already forgotten) gave me "results" but it could have been a disambiguation page.

dingaling9y ago

> 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.