
Wikimedia telnet interface - _joe
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway
======
lucb1e
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.)

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

~~~
SilasX
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Public_release)

------
_toastie
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.

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

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

~~~
digi_owl
Yes and no.

Telnet is perhaps the internet's debugger.

While the most common use was to access a CLI Somewhere, most of the
"traditional" internet protocols can be operated via telnet.

Note btw that there is no login needed to access this "joke". Just enter the
address and presto.

SSH is a single use tool in comparison.

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zeveb
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_owl
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.

~~~
dorfsmay
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.

~~~
digi_owl
While i agree on the "app" thing, and something i tried to capture with the
comment about abstraction, i have seen way too many sites default to massive
images that they expect the client to scale as needed, taking up both
bandwidth and client hardware resources.

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bhaak
Cool. I would use this quite often.

I hope [https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-
telnet](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. :-(

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halotrope
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.

~~~
tangue
Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

~~~
halotrope
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.

~~~
hyperion2010
That's because it's lispy!

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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...](http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/openvms_notes_my_OpenVMS_system.html)

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.

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

telnet telehack.com .... . usenet

I with they had trn installed.

~~~
nickpsecurity
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. :)

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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.
        ....

~~~
dingaling
> 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.

~~~
cscottnet
Sadly, this does seem to be a limitation of our labs infrastructure. :(

------
colinbartlett
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?

Oh, wait, ugh... is this an April Fool's joke?

~~~
cscottnet
Accessing Wikimedia content while being Really Really certain that there is no
downloadable code being executed, or browser exploits being inserted. Browsing
for the paranoid.

Here's a bit more:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-30/Technology_report)

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pavel_lishin
I'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. :/

~~~
zxexz
Have you not tried it? It's working great!

EDIT: With the exception of the connection being closed on the Wikipedia end
relatively often.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Sure, but will it be up on April 2nd?

~~~
cscottnet
If you use it, we will keep it up.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Turns out, I don't know how to do that with telnet as a one-liner :/

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vog
Wow! This even has auto-completion and other shell goodies.

However, there seems to be a bug in the auto-completion:

When pressing TAB immediately after the prompt appears, the whole telnet
session hangs and does not respond anymore.

~~~
cscottnet
Fixed!

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cmrdporcupine
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.

~~~
teraflop
Try typing "use en.wikipedia.org" first.

~~~
cscottnet
Yeah, the domain setting was leaking between sessions before. Oops. Fixed now.

------
cscottnet
See
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway](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.

~~~
cscottnet
Oh -- and report bugs/feature requests at
[https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-
telnet/issues](https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet/issues) please.
Patches are even better.

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haddr
It's a joke, but it really works :)

------
jxy
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?

~~~
simcop2387
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.

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nullc
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.

------
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?

~~~
schoen
The public NetHack server at alt.org has an SSH interface alongside the telnet
interface. Try

ssh nethack@alt.org

It works properly with no password. It would be cool if Wikimedia would set up
a similar thing for this service.

~~~
cscottnet
Patches welcome!

------
rburhum
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 :)

------
joeyh
[https://tmp.kitenet.net/oldskool-4-1-2016.png](https://tmp.kitenet.net/oldskool-4-1-2016.png)

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justanother
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.

------
agumonkey
No money but lots of time and ideas I see.

~~~
cscottnet
It's actually a 269-line test case for more serious projects at the
foundation: the Offline Content Generator and Parsoid. We're allowed to have
fun in the service of the greater goal. More technical details at
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway)

~~~
agumonkey
I was meanly poking at Wales mails and hyper disrupting popup for money (you
guess how much I like all this).

That said, I friggin love the telnet access point. I am a bit fed up with the
ever more weighty web so simple text link + repl gets my vote.

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x1798DE
I would really like it if HN could mark things that are jokes as such, or
constrain them to one thread.

~~~
_joe
This is not just a joke; the interface is working (apart from some bugs you
might expect at this stage) and while the announcement is clearly a joke, the
interface is IMHO pretty cool

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digi_owl
hrmf, for some reason it disconnects me seconds after giving the prompt.

Edit: Never mind, was using an overly "clever" terminal emulator...

~~~
jandrese
I was immediately kicked off when using real telnet, but it worked fine with
netcat (nc). I think this service gets confused if you send it the telnet
control stuff.

~~~
digi_owl
Could be. but using a "dumber" terminal seems to allow the connection to last
longer...

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justinlardinois
The comments in this thread make the joke even better.

