Hello,
I trying to get earliest revision dates for a set of approximately 4,000,000 Wikipedia articles. Looking at the MediaWiki API, it seems that the only way to get information on earliest revisions is to query on one article at a time. For 4,000,000 articles, this will take far too long...
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.
Thanks, Ryan