

Ask HN: Has anyone used the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction? - shafqat

Has anyone used the Freebase WEX? Are there better ways to get Wikipedia article summaries easily? The Wikipedia API doesn't seem to have a simple way to extract just an article summary (i.e. the first paragraph).
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babyshake
Using WEX for a web application will require a ton of work that you want to
avoid if possible.

Freebase _does_ have a summary of each topic, typically pulled from wikipedia.

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shafqat
Yes, but there is no way to get the summary from Freebase directly. They dont
include the summary in the TSV textfile downloads they offer. On their site,
it says the only way to get the summaries is via WEX.

Are there other good ways to get the Wikipedia summaries?

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rchiniquy
You can just download all their data in a giant tarball and pull it out of
there yourself.

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rchiniquy
Totally wondering about this myself. Not convinced Freebase is perfect for me.

