Jeff Thompson wrote:

Hello all,

First of all, thanks so much for putting together this amazing resource for folks to use! I'm an artist and have been working on a project exploring sort of "hidden pathways" through Wikipedia.

I've been able to successfully query a list of all links in the main article namespace (I hope I'm using the terms right here).

I think you mean all links /in a given article/. There is no "order of appearance" when you are talking about "many articles".

The problem is that I need the links in order of appearance, not alphabetical order.

Is this possible? Maybe I'm missing something simple here?

No. The order is not stored with the links, only the existance. If a link appears twice, it is stored only once. And they are not stored in order of appearance in the article, but in order of how addition. So it is not available. You can manually parse the articles to obtain that data.

If you are working with all articles links, you may be better using a dump http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html than querying the API for a whole namespace.