Raymond Yee wrote:
4) Does it make sense to try to obtain bot privileges
(even for read
only access)? My understanding is that bots get access to larger
payload in some API calls.
See if the api modules you use has higher limits for bots.
Note: since I'm looking at recent changes to the
Wikipedia, downloading
a data dump of the Wikipeida to work on doesn't help me.
If you are fetching the list of recent changes, you should consider
having your bot listening on
irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia and
reacting to the events there.
If you're concerned just with a subset of edits, you could reduce your
requests to almost nothing. If you need some extra processing, there may
not be much difference (since enwiki has constant changes).