I believe the answer to "how do I obtain Wikipedia content" in some "meaningful" way can be answered by the MediaWiki (the software that is running at Wikipedia) API page. Make sure to check out the Useful Links section, which has as its first entry a API Sandbox.

Update: I found an additional link from the IBM Developerworks Site that describes how to Hook into Wikipedia information using PHP and the MediaWiki API. It's not Perl, but then neither is your question, really.

In reply to Re^3: Create a dictionary from wikipedia by Sinistral
in thread Create a dictionary from wikipedia by vit

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