[Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

prodigal_son · 2026-01-06 17:23:19

Hi all,

I'm looking to gauge the interest on a feature for MediaWiki (the engine behind ArchWiki) that I'm advocating for upstream.

Currently, the Arch Wiki allows exporting pages to PDF, but not to Markdown. As someone who relies heavily on CLI workflows and automation, I often find myself scraping wiki pages, running them through Pandoc and manually cleaning them to get a readable, clean text format for local storage or processing.

I've noticed a few use cases where a native .md export would be valuable for the Arch community:

Terminal Viewing: Reading markdown formatted guides without HTML clutter.
Local Archiving: Storing config guides in personal notes (Obsidian/VimWiki) without formatting breakage.
Automation: Parsing configuration steps programmatically or feeding documentation into LLMs for troubleshooting and keeping tokens clean on HTML tags.

There is an active ticket on the Wikimedia Phabricator regarding this. The developers are asking for a "citation needed" regarding whether technical communities actually want this.

My Question: Is this a feature other Arch users would utilize? If you have a workflow that would benefit from raw Markdown export, I'd love to hear it so I can relay that context to the developers.

Note: I am not asking Arch admins to implement this, but seeking community feedback to support the upstream request.

lilydjwg · 2026-01-07 04:00:57

For terminal viewing, just use a browser like w3m or elinks? Markdown isn't very readable in the terminal either unless you use a markdown renderer.

For archiving, does copy-and-paste HTML work? VimWiki doesn't use markdown, or does it now? And markdown isn't a standardized format: different programs use different syntaxes. HTML is more universal in this aspect.

For LLMs, you can just paste mediawiki text into it. It will preserve more semantics than markdown.

I actually want the opposite more: paste markdown into mediawiki. I find myself sometimes paste markdown into GitHub, preview, and then copy the rendered result into mediawiki.

seth · 2026-01-07 08:41:39

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/wikicurses/
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/wiki-tui/

There're also frameworks for bots/scrapers, but status.archlinux.org

@lilydwg, it's not perfect but there's eg https://www.markdowntoolbox.com/tools/c … mediawiki/

prodigal_son · 2026-01-07 10:23:42

lilydjwg wrote:

For LLMs, you can just paste mediawiki text into it. It will preserve more semantics than markdown.

TIL. Thank you, that's actually neat lol

ArchWiki Wine page and the tokenizer of gpt-oss for example

HTML source = 21910 tokens
HTML -> markdown with pandoc = 21540 tokens
HTML -> html cleaner -> markdown = 16640 tokens
mediawiki source = 11861 tokens
mediawiki -> markdown = 14984 tokens

There's also the XML export but I couldn't find it any useful. I'd usually go the HTML -> html cleaner -> markdown with some manual cleaning afterwards. I guess I know too little about mediawiki. Now I have an easier approach to use. Love you lol

lilydjwg wrote:

I actually want the opposite more: paste markdown into mediawiki

Have you tried pandoc? I work with markdown a lot and I love it. I also love how some projects like the docs of the posthog open source project have a copy to markdown button.

lilydjwg wrote:

For terminal viewing, just use a browser like w3m or elinks?

seth wrote:

wikicurses, wiki-tui

Yeah I guess I just made a poor point with that

Last edited by prodigal_son (2026-01-07 10:24:32)

lilydjwg · 2026-01-07 10:46:19

prodigal_son wrote:

There's also the XML export but I couldn't find it any useful.

It's useful when you want to import the pages into another MediaWiki site.

prodigal_son wrote:

Have you tried pandoc?

I haven't tried it yet because GitHub was convenient at the time. I have made a markdown-to-bbcode converter with it in the past but have uninstalled it with its haskell-* deps later when I found myself seldom use it anymore.

system72 · 2026-01-07 12:37:07

we need one standardized format for markup just like usb c

prodigal_son · 2026-01-07 15:53:00

lilydjwg wrote:

but have uninstalled it with its haskell-* deps later when I found myself seldom use it anymore

The web version is convenient as well and I happen to use it a lot. For shell, I've grabbed a binary from the GH release assets and added it to path. I'd update it once in a while.

system72 wrote:

we need one standardized format for markup just like usb c

That's a fair point. I think Mediawiki is a nice standard and still a popular choice choice today, although maybe static websites are preferred nowdays. The point here isn't about changing it though.

The discussion is about having a "Copy markdown" in the "Tools" options, next to "Printable version" and I posted to see if anyone else is interested in having it. For me it would save some time every other day as I was finding myself doing it manually. It's an interoperability option with other projects who use markdown like Git (Github, Gitlab), Stack Exchange, Discourse, Reddit. Now that LLMs rise in popularity and they also happen to use markdown natively as well, my guess would be more people are going to be interested in it.

For me it'd be more useful option to have a local offline version of a page from the wiki in markdown compared to a local offline PDF printable version since my notes and my projects use markdown.

Last edited by prodigal_son (2026-01-07 15:54:27)

seth · 2026-01-07 16:01:54

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/html2markdown ?

Arch Linux

#1 2026-01-06 17:23:19

[Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#2 2026-01-07 04:00:57

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#3 2026-01-07 08:41:39

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#4 2026-01-07 10:23:42

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#5 2026-01-07 10:46:19

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#6 2026-01-07 12:37:07

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#7 2026-01-07 15:53:00

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

#8 2026-01-07 16:01:54

Re: [Discussion] Markdown export for Wiki pages (Upstream Feature Request)

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