How to extract data from a Wikipedia article?

Question

I have a question regarding parsing data from Wikipedia for my Android app. I have a script that can download the XML by reading the source from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/

Answer 1

action=parse doesn't work well with per-section parse, consider this shoert example:

Foo is a barreally!
== References ==

Parsing just the zeroth section will result in red error message about without while parsing the first one will result in empty references list.

However, there's a better solution: action=mobileview is not only free from this problem, but it's also specifically intended for mobile apps and gives you mobile-optimized HTML.