NLP: Building (small) corpora, or “Where to get lots of not-too-specialized English-language text files?”

Question

Does anyone have a suggestion for where to find archives or collections of everyday English text for use in a small corpus? I have been using Gutenberg Project books for a

Answer 1

Wikipedia seems to be the best way. Yes you'd have to parse the output. But thanks to wikipedia's categories you could easily get different types of articles and words. e.g. by parsing all the science categories you could get lots of science words. Details about places would be skewed towards geographic names, etc.