An interactive Python terminal application that explores Wikipedia's knowledge graph via random discovery, category filtering, and real-time hyperlink web scraping.
- Random Discovery: Browse any Wikipedia article chosen uniformly at random from across the entire encyclopedia.
- Curated Discovery: Filter article selection by a user-chosen subject category, enabling focused exploration of a domain.
- Rabbit Hole Traversal: Starting from a random article, each subsequent article is randomly selected from the hyperlinks found inside the current article. This creates a chain of semantically related pages.
- Browser Integration: Seamlessly bridge the terminal and the web by pressing
[o]at any prompt to open the currently viewed Wikipedia article in your system's default web browser. - Rich Terminal UI: The display layer uses raw ANSI escape sequences for 24-bit color and includes a Braille character spinner animation during HTTP requests.
- Smart Parsing: The scraper automatically strips citation noise from the text and filters out non-article meta-pages.
The application is structured into three clearly separated layers:
- Scraping Layer: Handles network requests using connection pooling and parses HTML.
- Display Layer: Handles terminal rendering and dynamic text wrapping based on terminal width.
- Mode Layer: Manages the three independent interactive mode loops.
The project relies heavily on the Python Standard Library to remain lightweight, alongside two core external dependencies for web scraping.
| Library | Source | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
requests |
PyPI | HTTP GET, session management, redirect following |
beautifulsoup4 |
PyPI | HTML parsing, CSS selector queries, DOM navigation |
re |
Built-in | Regex to strip citation markers from scraped text |
textwrap |
Built-in | Dynamic word-wrapping based on terminal dimensions |
urllib.parse |
Built-in | Unquoting and parsing Wikipedia URL slugs for clean titles |
webbrowser |
Built-in | Hooking into the OS to open live articles in a native browser |
shutil |
Built-in | Detecting real-time terminal column width for rendering |
random |
Built-in | Uniform random selection of articles and hyperlinks |
Figure 1: Main Menu showing the three modes
Figure 2: Rabbit Hole mode showing traversal depth
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/swechchhapatel/wikipedia-explorer.git
cd wikipedia-explorer- Install the required dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt- Run the application:
python wiki_explorer.pyContributions are welcome and appreciated!
If you'd like to improve this project, please follow these steps:
- Fork the repository
- Create a new branch
git checkout -b feature/your-feature-name
- Make changes and commit
git commit -m "Add: your message" - Push to your branch and open a Pull Request
- Feel free to improve features, UI, or model performance.
Made with ❤️