Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Khalida BEN SIDI AHMED wrote:
>> In the html code of a Wikipedia article how to recognise the
>> *first*sentence of this article?
> 
> It's not marked up and probably differs among language versions. On the
> english version the first `p` child of a `mw-content-ltr` element is a
> good bet, as I pointed out earlier, to identify the first paragraph. It
> would then be necessary to find the full stop at the end of a sentence;
> criteria for that include that a space or the end of a paragraph follows
> and that it is not included in some nesting construct like parentheses;
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_boundary_disambiguation discusses
> some of the problems and includes pointers to some solutions.

I've found you have to be careful with the <p> trick. Sometimes geo
coordinates in the article will mistakenly use a <p> or one will slip into
an infobox or a hatnote. There are also other edge cases like disambiguation
pages (where the first "sentence" often ends in a colon, at least on the
English Wikipedia). I'm not sure if anyone has put together a comprehensive
set of edge cases.

The real answer here seems to be switching to an architecture that makes the
distinction explicit. I don't imagine that'll be happening any time soon,
though.

MZMcBride



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