janas-wiki

janas-wiki

janas-wiki is a Janas service: an MCP server over standard input and output for Wikipedia, used when someone asks for Wikipedia or for what is around a place. No key. janas-chat starts it by itself when the binary sits in `services/` beside the packaged program, or in the same directory.Tools, each with a `language` (the user's Wikipedia, then English if that one has nothing; if the model omits it, `LANG` is used, else English):- wiki_search — matching pages, best first, title plus Wikidata's one-line description- wiki_page — the page for the user: a short page whole, a long page as its introduction plus section names, or one section by name or the start of the name. A section over 10,000 characters is cut at a paragraph and the answer names the parts. A redirect is followed and said. A disambiguation page comes back as the list it points to. The model receives a note (address, how many words were shown, the sections), not the article- wiki_nearby — pages about what lies around a place, nearest first, with distance and direction, within up to 10 km. The place is a page title (the page's coordinates), `lat,lon`, or nothing, which means where the user isThe page and the note are separate MCP audiences. janas-chat shows the user's part as it is and gives the model only the note. A client that ignores audience gives the model both.Text comes from each Wikipedia's MediaWiki Action API (TextExtracts and GeoData). It is plain text: tables and infoboxes are not included. The text is Wikipedia's, under CC BY-SA 4.0, and every answer includes the page address. Requests use `janas-wiki/<version> (https://github.com/prabanta-dev/janas)`, one at a time, and answers are kept for an hour. Location with no place uses GeoJS, then ipwho.is, as janas-weather does. Logs go to standard error.

-h, --help

Print usage and exit 0. Any other argument exits 2.

JANAS_LOCATION

City, `lat,lon`, or `off`, for wiki_nearby with no place.

Wikipedia language when the client does not pass one (`it_IT.UTF-8` selects `it`).

This is an MCP server, not a prompt. --no-services or --no-mcp on janas-chat skips it. An `mcpServers` entry named `wiki` in `~/.config/janas/mcp.json` replaces the automatic start.The model is told to open Wikipedia only when the user asks for it, or asks what is around a place, and not to call other Janas services because a page names a town. It is also told that Wikipedia is not a source for what happened today. A page shown to the user is not repeated to the model, so the model cannot quote lines it was not given.

janas-wiki ships with Janas, written by Maurizio "camauri" Cammalleri (GNU GPL 3 or later). The first public Janas-LLM release was in September 2026.

janas-chat(1), janas-maps(1), janas-mcp(1), claude(1)

Source code · Documentation