Wikimedia telnet interface

The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool&#x27;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.<p>(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.)

Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool&#x27;s joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.

What&#x27;s funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, &#x27;funny&#x27;: it&#x27;s actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

Cool. I would use this quite often.<p>I hope <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cscott&#x2F;wikipedia-telnet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cscott&#x2F;wikipedia-telnet</a> gets more contributor love now. Especially a pager would dearly be needed.<p>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).<p>Then they replaced it with a slow html page. :-(

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.

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&#x2F; cache cleared. I&#x27;m curious if it&#x27;s more or less efficient.<p>On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal (&quot;green screen&quot;) and web apps had interesting things to say.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www3.sympatico.ca&#x2F;n.rieck&#x2F;docs&#x2F;openvms_notes_my_OpenVMS_system.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www3.sympatico.ca&#x2F;n.rieck&#x2F;docs&#x2F;openvms_notes_my_OpenV...</a><p>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.<p>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&#x2F; minimal GUI&#x27;s (eg REBOL) w&#x2F; efficient protocol is best middle ground.

It&#x27;s case sensitive :-(<p>That&#x27;s worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia&#x27;s archaic capitalization constraints, so it&#x27;s neither going to be the &quot;official&quot; 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?<p>I wish it had search.<p><pre><code> &gt;&gt;&gt; easybcd easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch &quot;easybcd&quot; for you. No worries. There are lots of other pages to read. Pick a different title. &gt;&gt;&gt; Easybcd Easybcd Sorry! Could not fetch &quot;Easybcd&quot; for you. No worries. There are lots of other pages to read. Pick a different title. &gt;&gt;&gt; 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. ....</code></pre>

I connected and spent a few minutes poking around to try and understand the usefulness of this. Something for those in countries where web traffic is blocked? Is this a power tool just for Wikipedia editors?<p>Oh, wait, ugh... is this an April Fool&#x27;s joke?

I&#x27;m actually incredibly disappointed that this isn&#x27;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&#x27;t want to bother filtering out. This would have been pretty great. :&#x2F;

Wow! This even has auto-completion and other shell goodies.<p>However, there seems to be a bug in the auto-completion:<p>When pressing TAB immediately after the prompt appears, the whole telnet session hangs and does not respond anymore.

April fools joke aside, I&#x27;d actually use this, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to fully work. Most articles would not resolve for me and welcome page was joke content.

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telnet_gateway" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telnet_gateway</a> for technical details. The technology behind this is used for Wikipedia&#x27;s Visual Editor, PDF export, and plain text export, so it is very likely to be supported if enough folks find it useful.

It&#x27;s a joke, but it really works :)

I almost skipped it, but I tried anyway. Wonderful! I like the wiktionary:<p><pre><code> use en.wiktionary.org </code></pre> Feels dictd on steroids.<p>Somehow I got disconnected frequently. Is it intentional? Or is it just my company&#x27;s network hate telnet?

Much faster than the web interface. Even over Tor! The fast disconnections are a bit lame, would be a bit better if it used curses so that it would start scrolled up.

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?

I thought it was a funny joke - I was curious how far they took it. Wholy crap, `telnet telnet.wmflabs.org` works and the searches do too. Nice job :)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.kitenet.net&#x2F;oldskool-4-1-2016.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.kitenet.net&#x2F;oldskool-4-1-2016.png</a>

This is really nice for those of us who run vintage computers (e.g. Apple II) with ethernet adapters. I hope they keep this around.

No money but lots of time and ideas I see.

I would really like it if HN could mark things that are jokes as such, or constrain them to one thread.

hrmf, for some reason it disconnects me seconds after giving the prompt.<p>Edit: Never mind, was using an overly &quot;clever&quot; terminal emulator...

The comments in this thread make the joke even better.