Ask HN: Has anyone used the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction?

4 pointsshafqat4 comments

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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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.

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?

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

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

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