wget currently produces on-screen tick-marks for each kilobyte of downloaded data. This can be informative, but it would be nice to have options for this display. I'd propose two additional options: 1) Display a "." for each kilobyte, without the spacing and start/end marks ("33%", etc.) for reading by a program that spawns wget. 2) A progress bar based on the size of the file -- this doesn't need to be any more complicated than the one used by rpm when using -h.
I doubt this is something we'd add here; you may want to contact the wget maintainers.