Farkas, Illes wrote:

Hello,

We're trying to find for each featured article the time when it acquired featured status.

At 22:07 on 15 July 2008 GimmeBot modified the page "King Arthur" with the comment "GimmeBot adding FA star". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=King_Arthur&diff=226083953&...

Do you think a pattern match /addding\s+\S+\s+star/ (in the comments field) would be the most reliable/appropriate way of finding in the history dump file the time when each of the featured articles acquired this status?

This would only get the cases where it was added by the bot, the FA system almost certainly predates it, and may even predate the star in articles.

Or do you happen to know of a special page listing this time for each featured article ?

Thanks a lot in advance.

You'll want to use the subpages of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Featured_... though that doesn't include instances of articles being de-featured.