If you’ve ever had the inclination to look up information using the shell prompt, the Command-Line Fu site explains how to query Wikipedia using the built-in dig utility.

The idea is simple – you can use the dig command to look up DNS records, including text records attached to a DNS entry, and somebody created an interface that pulls back the Wikipedia summary for an article by querying the records from the command line.

dig +short txt <keyword>.wp.dg.cx

To do this for yourself, use the following syntax from your shell prompt, replacing the keyword with the single word you are trying to look up. Because this uses the command-line dig tool, this should work natively on Linux, but Windows users need to have Cygwin installed.