Batch Wikipedia Searcher

Do you hate having to go through so many web pages just to look something up on Wikipedia? You could just set the English Wikipedia to your home page, or you could do this!

It is a simple batch file that asks for the search topic, then brings you to the Wikipedia entry on that topic.

Step 1: Making the Batch File

First you want to make your batch file, this is very simple and many of you will already know how to do this.

First, open up a notepad document.
Go to -File-, -Save As...-, then in the 'File name' textfield, type in 'WikipediaSearcher.bat'. The name doesn't matter, but .bat is essential.
Remember to switch 'Save as type:' to 'All Files' from 'Text Documents'

Comments

[ygoetz]

It don't works if there is a "space" in %topic% !

[account3r2]

i changed the code so it searches bing

[g3lrod]

Can you make one for google?

[Puus]

For everyone saying there's other ways, well for us who are trying to get more into batch files I think it's fun just knowing how to. Even though I knew this, easy batches like these helped me when I started in the beginning.

[ithinkibrokeit]

this is awesome! I found this so useful i wrote a visual basic script so it has a search box i can post the script if anyone is interested

[shooby]

In firefox, you can just type "wiki [search term]" in the address bar, hit enter, et voila, you find what you were looking for. That's because in firefox, terms entered in the address bar are searched for, and the browser directs you to the first google search webpage, unless the term is too obscure/the match is not good enough.

[berserk]

Hah. And I thought it was fun and tongue-in-cheek to make a batch file to search wikipedia, but this little nugget was definitely worth coming for!

[dani3l]

Wikipedia already have a -real- search tool!

[fredricksburgthethird]

would it be possible to just see the text of a website in the bat window?

[Jackhole]

Yeah I actually have the enlish Wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) as the page my bookmark sends me too, but I really made this Instructable so people can adapt it to some other site this would work on.

And wow, I learn more and more things about Firefox everyday.

[theRIAA]

i know its annoying, but you can search english wikipedia on their homepage by default under the big puzzle globe... or usually just googleing "wiki" or "(topic here) wiki" works good as well

[DELETED_spoonty]

(removed by author or community request)

[thehappytent]

or just use wiki: in google...