The sleep time as implemented in pywikipedia is influenced by three factors:
- the minimum time between requests, minthrottle=1 (by default) in user-config.py
- the minimum time between page saves, put_throttle=10
- the database lag on the DB servers - pages will not be saved unless the lag is less than maxlag = 5
(all values in seconds).
In the case of wikidata, the maximum number of saves/edits per minute is 60 (iirc), so you could reduce put_throttle to 1 by adding
put_throttle=1
in your user-config.py
Best,
Merlijn