You appear to have an old version of wget. From the manpage of 1.8.1:

--progress=type

Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are dot and bar.

...

Specifying --progress=bar will draw a nice ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a ``thermometer'' display) to indicate retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, this option will be ignored, and Wget will revert to the dot indicator. If you want to force the bar indicator, use --progress=bar:force.

Here's what I get:

$ wget --progress=bar:force www.perlmonks.org 2>&1 | less
--13:18:17--  http://www.perlmonks.org/
           => `index.html'
Resolving www.perlmonks.org... done.
Connecting to www.perlmonks.org[66.39.54.27]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]

^M    [<=>                                  ] 0            --.--K/s   
+          ^M    [ <=>                                 ] 12,889       
+ 42.81K/s             ^M    [  <=>                                ] 6
+3,569       125.67K/s             ^M    [   <=>                      
+         ] 75,054       148.07K/s             

13:18:19 (148.07 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [75054]
[download]

Makeshifts last the longest.