I would love to have a block that retrieves the first few paragrahs about any seachable subject and creates an output? I have tried reading how to build blocks but I got lost.
Does Wikipedia even have any APIs? If so, I can't find them on their site...
John
Well, maybe we can use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/
It is Wikipedia export feature, it's some kind of webservice which returns XML data. But the problem is that we need to know exact article title. I'll examine search feature first, probably it can be paired with this Export functionality.
Is there any Live Search option for searching website, for example: "Belgrade site:wikipedia.org" (i use "site:" on google often). We can fetch that search result set, and than pass proper FULLPAGENAME title to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/FULLPAGENAME to get that XML.
I found a free wikipedia widget that uses a yahoo api that searches wikipedia.
Perhaps we could use this as a starting point? It is located at: http://kentbrewster.com/wiki-widget/
he provides the code for the widget on the last page: http://kentbrewster.com/wiki-widget/?step=9
I understand the concepts but (of course) I'm not any good at changing code.
thanks for replying.
The documentation is here.
I am very much willing to create blocks that interact with Wikipedia. If anyone wants to do a project on this, I'd be glad to participate and/or exchange ideas 
It has been created. Called "WikipediaSearch"
To help with functionality and speed, it is limited to returning 50 values. It will search for page tiles starting at what the search term is. So searching for "Microsoft" will return pages that the titles start with "Microsoft" and then will return the next 50 entries.
Also, because of the way wikipedia works, the first letter in the search term must be a capital letter. I will work on a function to automatically do this, but for now you must make sure the first letter is capital.
Great work (even though I haven't seen it yet =P but I bet it's awesome! And even more if compared to nothing, which was what we had before..)
