2006/3/11, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com:
I'm working on a bot to deal with the flood of no-source and untagged images on the English Wikipedia. My current design calls for, once a day, downloading the upload log for the previous 24 hours, then checking each image description page and adding a template as appropriate. About 2000 images are uploaded each day, and only around 15% need tagging. What's the best way of getting the wikitext of an article if there's an 85% chance that you won't be editing it? Is Special:Export faster than starting an edit, or is there some other method?
Special:Export allows you to get more than one page at once, thus speeding up the loading of pages considerably. To do this the normal way would entail 2300 requests to the server (2000 pages and 300 edits), if you do it through Special:Export with for example 50 pages at a time (and you can do it with 100 or 200 without problems), it's only 340 requests left.
If you use the Python Wikipediabot framework (and if you haven't done much programming yet, I would advise that, since it gives you many things already programmed-in that could be useful), there is a method site.getall() to do this.
Andre Engels