How to get plain text out of Wikipedia

Question

I'd like to write a script that gets the Wikipedia description section only. That is, when I say

/wiki bla bla bla

it will go to the Wikipedia page for bla bla bla, get the following, and return it to the chatroom:

"Bla Bla Bla" is the name of a song made by Gigi D'Agostino. He described this song as "a piece I wrote thinking of all the people who talk and talk without saying anything". The prominent but nonsensical vocal samples are taken from UK band Stretch's song "Why Did You Do It"

How can I do this?

Answer 1

Use the MediaWiki API, which runs on Wikipedia. You will have to do some parsing of the data yourself.

For instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=json&&titles=Bla%20Bla%20Bla

means

fetch (action=query) the content (rvprop=content) of the most recent revision of Main Page (title=Main%20Page) in JSON format (format=json).

You will probably want to search for the query and use the first result, to handle spelling errors and the like.