Josh Pazmino

Wikireceipt

Receipt printer + barcode scanner interface for Wikipedia.

year
2025–26

receipt-wiki extends the printer-scanner mechanism from Receipt Loom and receipt sky⁠ with support for Wikipedia articles.

It is today relatively "wiki-complete" in that it has basic parity with Wikipedia's mobile app, or its standard desktop experience. With a connected barcode scanner (or multiple), it functions as a desktop / roomscale browser for traversing the hypergraph that is Wikipedia.

Any given article can be printed from the companion webapp⁠, at which point said article can serve as a jumping-off point for the user who printed it, or another who might later happen upon it.

The result is a browsing session whose history accumulates in physical space. Printouts can be stacked/[re]arranged, rolled up into scrolls, shown/given to others, etc.

This project has been supported by a Wikimedia Community Fund Rapid Grant and will be open-sourced in the coming month(s).

WikiGameJam

I prototyped a Wikipedia integration for my receipt-printing CLI⁠ in advance of a WikiGameJam⁠ showcase @ Hex House last October.

2025-10-17 21:56:09	receipt-print text hi	611ms
2025-10-17 21:56:18	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye	8s
2025-10-17 21:56:49	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye	6s
2025-10-17 21:57:01	receipt-print action cut	584ms
2025-10-17 21:57:04	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye	14s
2025-10-17 22:07:25	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye	7s
2025-10-17 22:08:45	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_Boston_Marathon	11s
2025-10-17 22:13:42	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Bok-seok	4s
2025-10-17 22:14:21	lg	5s
2025-10-17 22:20:33	lg	2s
2025-10-17 22:20:39	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Bok-seok	35s
2025-10-17 22:21:19	lg	8s
2025-10-17 22:21:31	receipt-print action cut	323ms
2025-10-17 22:21:39	receipt-print action cut	622ms
2025-10-17 22:23:02	lg	1m
2025-10-17 22:24:43	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertale_Soundtrack	6s
2025-10-17 22:28:37	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Chike	2s
2025-10-17 22:34:31	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop	18s
2025-10-17 22:48:33	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_male	8s
2025-10-17 22:50:45	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party	5s
2025-10-17 22:52:52	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy	10m
2025-10-17 23:02:57	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Ones	1s
2025-10-17 23:02:58	y	638ms
2025-10-17 23:04:01	receipt-print action cut	679ms
2025-10-17 23:04:07	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Ones	2s
2025-10-17 23:04:56	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loser_(Tame_Impala_song)	1s
2025-10-17 23:05:03	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loser_(Tame_Impala_song)"	2s
2025-10-17 23:06:57	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politik_(song)	181ms
2025-10-17 23:07:02	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politik_(song)"	3s
2025-10-17 23:08:26	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Public_Secrets	1s
2025-10-17 23:11:55	receipt-print wiki ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_(NewJeansの曲)	144ms
2025-10-17 23:11:59	receipt-print wiki "ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_(NewJeansの曲)"	326ms
2025-10-17 23:12:04	receipt-print wiki "https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_(NewJeansの曲)"	1s
2025-10-17 23:13:45	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_commuter_rail"	20s
2025-10-17 23:14:10	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounder_commuter_rail" --max-headings 4	8s
2025-10-17 23:15:45	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Ferrari	9s
2025-10-17 23:16:37	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutty_Narrows_Bridge	9s
2025-10-17 23:23:00	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationery	5s
2025-10-17 23:38:57	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Zelkha	3s
2025-10-17 23:39:28	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Zelkha	3s
2025-10-17 23:40:22	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intimacy	4s
2025-10-17 23:47:50	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_maps?utm_source=chatgpt.com	18ms
2025-10-17 23:47:57	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_maps	3s
2025-10-17 23:48:24	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_maps	2s
2025-10-17 23:50:45	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania	18s
2025-10-17 23:51:17	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania --max-headings 10	25s
2025-10-18 00:03:03	receipt-print wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_women%27s_road_cycling	685ms
2025-10-18 00:03:09	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_women%27s_road_cycling"	542ms
2025-10-18 00:03:20	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_women%27s_road_cycling"	675ms
2025-10-18 00:03:40	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_women's_road_cycling"	4s
2025-10-18 00:05:08	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump" --max-headings 10	12s
2025-10-18 00:16:18	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe" --max-headings 10	10s
2025-10-18 00:21:36	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrum_Mound"	2s
2025-10-18 00:22:45	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon"	832ms
2025-10-18 00:26:49	ls	66ms
2025-10-18 00:26:53	ls	26ms
2025-10-18 00:27:20	cd print	32ms
2025-10-18 00:27:43	nmtui	36s
2025-10-18 00:28:36	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu"	32s
2025-10-18 00:28:50	receipt-print	58ms
2025-10-18 00:28:52	cd print	25ms
2025-10-18 00:28:53	receipt-print	319ms
2025-10-18 00:28:54	receipt-print	297ms
2025-10-18 00:30:22	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lih"	4s
2025-10-18 00:31:37	receipt-print wiki "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists"	30s
2025-10-18 00:40:51	poweroff	97ms

log

Added
By
Josh Pazmino

40589462⁠

Sundance Film Festival

The project's first extended public run took place at Park City, Utah's last⁠ Sundance in January 2026.

I spent much of the week printing pages with editors, WikiPortraits⁠ photographers, and festival attendees, encountering & correcting for edge cases not yet handled: revisions, redirects, multilingual text, tables, equations, etc.

Several Wikireceipts rolled into sealed scrolls

~fjpaz-net⁠ · CC BY-SA 4.0⁠

  1. Thermal receipt printer

    An Epson thermal receipt printer.

  2. Barcode scanner

    A handheld barcode scanner.

  3. Wikipedia

    1. Spring Awakening (musical)

    2. Mandarin Chinese

    3. Mode (music)

    4. Supernatural (NewJeans song)

    5. Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards

    6. Notes of a Crocodile

The printer became a gathering point for conversations about Wikipedia; people learned about each other through their article choices…

Sundance 2026 Deployment Report⁠

Wikipedia Day NYC

With a good amount of table space under nice lighting, users/attendees at March's (rescheduled) Wikipedia Day NYC⁠ engaged more directly with the system's available interactions.

I was stationed at my laptop, facing its screen and attendees (they could not see the screen) beside Kevin Payravi⁠ and his project, WikiAsteroids⁠.

Attendees stopped by for some onboarding (wherein I'd sometimes print them an article or two, and others simply explain the mechanics), during/after which interested users would take pages in-hand to interact with one or both of the available scanners (1 stationary + 1 handheld).

[I felt that] this was the first day that the users of the system were not just there as audience members being "demonstrated" to ... Each of these three users engaged with the system in a very rich, real/human way; the ways that they used it, and the things that they did were experiences that could only happen through the use of this particular [type of] system. edited

"browser" "history" as pages on table; no back/forward, no tabs

“Do you want content or links?”
“I want content”

“I feel like you could get lost in this”
“I feel like link mode is a whole.. rabbit hole you can get lost in”

game starting from pikachu⁠, “doing our own strategies” to get to the Met⁠

image

one person’s journey is another’s environment

[attendee] suggests: link pagination
~“it would be nice to see the next set of links for a given page”

“So it’s like a browser” me after explaining dual links/content
→ “it’s like an analog rabbit hole”

Discord

Observations I recorded in the project's Discord thread during the event.

What I like about Loom which I think we explored nicely today is that everyone kept using this word "rabbit hole." That’s true [/ it's true that you encounter rabbit holes],

but it’s also more than just a rabbit hole; it’s a system where you might encounter a given rabbit hole and then decide to go down that rabbit hole.

And going down the rabbit hole ~only costs you physical space/overhead. It doesn’t cost you any mental space [in comparison to e.g., web browsers, mobile phones], because you can literally [arrange the things you care about as you like, in physical space]. edited

Even a browser is a tool for the mind, a way to organize discrete objects into tabs …

and so: what is Wikipedia? It is itself a massive environment of discretely valuable concepts and happenings and people. On a certain level, what Wikipedia is is a map of things ... it’s a map of associations. edited

Someone literally knew the person (a guy whose name had just printed out. He said, "oh, I know that guy," and put it in his pocket …

Another guy noticed Sanskrit on the historical dictionary page, and his friends were from Belarus, and that was there too, so he was going to send it to them.

I guess the human mind is in fact [and among other things] a machine of associations … [using this system] you really see / note tacitly how Wikipedia is a map/system of associations. edited

so receipts as a “medium”

Josh

yes

but kind of actually yes

iMessage

Wiki-Play Fridays

Wiki-Play Fridays⁠, held at NYC PIT Pop Up⁠.

due to our qr code handling / design, all that we needed for our receipts and scanners to interoperate cleanly was for [Cybernetics Library] to add support for my wiki.receipt.blue domain as the base for article URLs. from there, their standard wikipedia QRs and mine of either type worked across their kiosk and my own edited

Claude Code session

image
image

We have interoperability set up between my stuff and the cybernetics library⁠’s own wiki-mixing kiosk

WhatsApp

Wikireceipt + Wiki Kiosk @ Wiki-Play Friday, May 2026.

Profhotchkiss⁠ · CC BY-SA 4.0⁠

Josh's own prints, among them facsimile transmission, cable television and digital television

Links sheets + Facsimile transmission

Profhotchkiss⁠ · CC BY-SA 4.0⁠

  1. Wikipedia

    1. Facsimile transmission

      The Facsimile transmission article printed by Wikireceipt.

    2. Digital television

      An entry on a links sheet: the link title, the sentence it came from, and a QR code that prints the article.

    3. Cable television

      Another entry on the same links sheet.

Wikimania Paris

I was in Paris in July for Wiki Fringe⁠ and the Wikimania⁠ conference itself.

The crowd included former Wikimedia staffers, the WikiPortraits crew, a representative from an open-source, open-weight, open-everything LLM project, and a Brooklyn artist with a receipt printer, printing Wikipedia articles on receipt paper.

The Wikipedian⁠

With 0uico⁠.

(@ Wikimania) I gave Jimmy Wales
https://wiki.receipt.blue/en/Encyclopédie⁠

iMessageHenry, Omar

wiki.receipt.blue

Josh Pazmino how far are we from deploying something that bay área wikipedians can have and use

Josh

not very far

maybe 1-2mo

Josh

do you remember the guy who I mentioned speaking to for a while (we thought for a moment that he was a notable German wikipedian)? he was very interested in receipts / had experience

he reached out like 2-3w ago I think and asked if he could run it for an event

so I was able to make certain changes in time, and he was able to run it
it runs in browser now with connected printer, though still need to test with other printers edited

WhatsAppto
The host's room sheet in the browser version, with the room code and a join QR

image

printer request

debating whether to
clean up and publish codebase oss,

or make it run entirely in browser so I can just give him link for event

guessing this will be easier
just will disable llm features like moderation (or could use jev lol) edited

actually both of the existing llm features are very jev

ok this runs in browser now

https://wiki.receipt.blue/en/Adam_lay_ybounden?depth=intro⁠

calls out to server for jev moderation when webgpu isn’t available

uses also jackbox style room codes for printing to host device from phone(s) edited

iMessageHenryto

People do not expect how fast it is - even reluctant bystanders asked for something to be printed only to see how fast it goes out.

Josh

yeah many indie receipt projects these days use slower portable ones like the cat printer⁠, I’ve noticed many impressed by speed of the desktop Epson ones also

Discord