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http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20070124/ - "page abstracts for Yahoo" - what is this file?

[... snip ...]

<title>Wikipedia: April</title>
<url>http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/April</url>
<abstract>

April is the fourth month of the year with 30 days. The name April comes from that Latin word aperire which means "to open".

</abstract>

Just out of curiosity, how is that abstract generated, and could it be generated quickly on the fly?

The reason I ask is that sometimes I'm reading an article, and see a linked term, and ask "What's that?". A lot of the time, I don't particularly need or want the full explanation - a quick two or three sentence summary would do fine.

In such a situation, hovering a mouse cursor over the link, and having some JavaScript fire off to fetch the two or three sentence abstract, which was then shown in a tooltip, could be ideal.

All the best, Nick.

...

In such a situation, hovering a mouse cursor over the link, and having some JavaScript fire off to fetch the two or three sentence abstract, which was then shown in a tooltip, could be ideal.

All the best, Nick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups

-Gurch

Very nice! It even does popups on your popups, which is kind of fancy ;-)

It looks to just be the first two sentences of the article.

Well I was looking for something that removes tables / disambiguation notices / etc at the start of articles - but the Navigation popups seems have this well and truly covered ;-)

All the best, Nick.