2009/6/20 randomcoder1@gmail.com

I'm interested in the biggest number of revisions I can get through a single request. The documentation here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php says that rvlimit would be a good parameter to pass if you want to fetch some revisions of an article and you want to set the number of revisions you receive :

rvlimit        - limit how many revisions will be returned (enum)                   No more than 500 (5000 for bots) allowed.

I tried that myself and only got to at most 50 revisions per request. Can I get more than 50 revisions per request ?

There's a simple trick to always get as many revisions as the API will let you: set rvlimit=max (this works for other xxlimit parameters too). The reason you can only get 50 is probably that you're passing rvprop=content, which has stricter limits because content fetching is expensive.

I understand that the program I'm running must be identified as a bot. Do I have to make an account for it and set in the notify wikipedia that it is a bot ? How can this notification be made ? What other 'benefits' does a bot have ?

The account your bot uses needs to be given bot rights. I have no idea what the criteria for that are or what the procedure is for applying for them, that's a community thing. Accounts with bot rights also get the option of marking their edits as bot edits, which means they'll be hidden from Special:Recentchanges unless you click "Show bots".

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)