You can also set a Java property, i.e. environment variable, on the command line and easily use it anywhere in your code.
The command line would be done this way:
c:/> java -jar -Dmyvar=enwiki-20111007-pages-articles.xml wiki2txt
and the java code accesses the value like this:
String context = System.getProperty("myvar");
See this question about argument passing in Java.