Following a comment from Scott on the last entry here, I looked into making a Wikipedia-based poetry generator. Scraping random WP pages isn't too difficult but the wikipedia Python library makes this project almost trivial. There's another library called Pywikibot - I may have to try that one next.

In the meantime, I have a script for producing short poems from a set of Wikipedia entries. It's only as good as the entries it's retrieved so far. I'd like to turn this into more of a machine learning project such that acceptable output can be distinguished from messy nonsense, but for now it's just a text corpus and a set of Markov chains.

Written language has the benefit of looking like nonsense to the human eye when we can't make sense of it, unlike, say, a protein sequence. It would be nice to leverage that advantage.

In the meantime, this is what I get:

Callinicos, 1989). His daughter Princess Catherine
Clair Township - west Israel Township,
In November 

Interment in Blue
Smith died suddenly
Richard Powell Sharkey, Helen Derr's 

In January 2010, Obadeyi went
They have also been recorded
3 was purely due to 

He even
As soon as look at you,
The reservoir was the second