wikipedia-oc_skill

Overview

This skill searches, retrieves, and summarizes articles from the English Wikipedia using the wikipedia Python module. It focuses on concise, structured results (title, summary, url) and is designed to run on Ubuntu. The developer welcomes feedback about whether the skill works in your environment.

How this skill works

The skill sets the Wikipedia language to English and uses wikipedia.search() to find candidate pages. It selects the best result (by default the top match), retrieves page.summary for concise answers, and returns a structured object with title, summary, and url. It explicitly handles DisambiguationError, PageError, and common network/timeouts, and falls back to refining queries when needed.

When to use it

• Quick factual lookups where a concise summary and source link suffice
• Bots or agents that need automated English Wikipedia references
• Workflows that require structured output (title, summary, url)
• Situations where you prefer summary over full-page content to limit verbosity
• Archival or backup tasks that fetch English Wikipedia entries programmatically

Best practices

• Always call wikipedia.set_lang("en") before searching
• Limit search results (e.g., results=3 or 5) to reduce ambiguity
• Prefer page.summary for answers; request page.content only when detail is necessary
• Catch DisambiguationError and present options or refine the query
• Include page.url in responses so users can verify sources

Example use cases

• Chatbots answering user questions with a short Wikipedia summary and source link
• Automated scripts that archive key article summaries into a database
• Research assistants that retrieve concise overviews of people, events, or topics
• Monitoring tools that periodically fetch summaries of evolving topics
• Educational tools that present verified, citable summaries to learners