wiki-as-git

An easy way to check the revision history of a Wikipedia article using Git commands.

Install

• You can run wiki-as-git using our Docker image, see Usage.

• Or you can install its dependencies manually : bun install

Usage

With Docker, using a pre-built image

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd)/articles:/home/wiki-as-git/articles bperel/wiki-as-git '<Article name>'

Example: docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd)/articles:/home/wiki-as-git/articles bperel/wiki-as-git '"Hello, World!" program'

Without Docker

Process a single article from Wikipedia API

bun run wiki-as-git.ts [--language=en] '<Article name>'

Example: bun run wiki-as-git.ts '"Hello, World!" program'

Process articles from an XML dump

bun run wiki-as-git.ts --xml-dump <path-to-xml-dump>

Example: bun run wiki-as-git.ts --xml-dump /path/to/bdrwiki-2026-01-01-p1p1433.xml.

Bzip2 compressed XML dumps are also supported.

When processing an XML dump, each article will have its Git history created in a separate directory under articles/<language>.wikipedia.org/<article-name>/. The language is automatically detected from the XML dump metadata.

If you have bot credentials for the wiki that you wish to target, copy-paste settings.example.json into a file named settings.json and fill in the bot's credentials. This will lift some limits of the Mediawiki API and make wiki-as-git much faster.