On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Ryan Shaw ryanshaw@ischool.berkeley.edu wrote:
So, my question is: is there any way to query for first revisions in batches? Alternatively, if there some other source of this information, such as data dumps? Since I am only looking for the timestamps of the first revision of each article, I'd like to avoid downloading complete histories for each article.
You could use the query service on the toolserver:
https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Query_service
The toolserver doesn't keep the content of revisions, but you only want metadata anyway so that's not a problem.