Skill

wikipedia

Wikipedia REST API. Get article summaries, search, browse related topics, and access on-this-day events. No authentication required. Uses a polite User-Agent header.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use wikipedia

Choose if

You need free, no-key encyclopedic lookups from an agent loop — article summaries, related-topic browsing, on-this-day events, search — with typed exit codes for self-correction. Beats hitting the raw Wikipedia REST API because the CLI handles User-Agent compliance, pagination, and rate-limit surfacing, and keeps responses --compact-friendly for token budgets.

Avoid if

You need authoritative, vandalism-resistant facts for high-stakes decisions — Wikipedia is community-edited and the CLI doesn't add verification on top. Also skip when the agent needs structured Wikidata entities (this wraps the article REST API, not the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint) or when language-specific edits aren't English (the README doesn't disclose multilingual coverage explicitly).

Risk Flags

  • LOW rate_limit Wikipedia enforces a polite-use policy via User-Agent but discloses no explicit threshold in this README. Exit code 7 surfaces rate-limited responses if Wikipedia throttles abusive clients. Agents on heavy lookup loops should batch queries and respect cache hints.
  • LOW data_quality Wikipedia content is community-edited — article summaries can shift over time, contain bias, or be vandalized between revisions. Agents using it as a factual ground-truth source for high-stakes tasks should cross-check.
  • LOW runtime Default install path needs Node (npx). Go-source fallback needs Go 1.26.3+. Pre-built binaries on macOS require Gatekeeper quarantine removal before first run.

Cost

Type: Free · Free tier: Wikipedia REST API requires no authentication and no API key. The CLI is a free MIT-licensed wrapper. Agents are expected to identify themselves via a polite User-Agent header (the CLI sets this automatically).

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install wikipedia
# No credentials required — the CLI sets a polite User-Agent automatically.
# First call works out of the box:
wikipedia-pp-cli summary --title "Claude (AI)"

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~2 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js 18+ (or Go 1.26.3+ for source install)

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT