title: Fetch excerpt from Wikipedia article?
body: <p>I've been up and down the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wikipedia API</a>, but I can't figure out if there's a <em>nice</em> way to fetch the excerpt of an article (usually the first paragraph). It would be nice to get the HTML formatting of that paragraph, too.</p>
  
  <p>The only way I currently see of getting something that resembles a snippet is by performing a fulltext search (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xmlfm&amp;action=query&amp;list=search&amp;srsearch=Fight+Club&amp;srlimit=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">example</a>), but that's not really what I want (too short).</p>
  
  <p>Is there any other way to fetch the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article than barbarically parsing HTML/WikiText?</p>