2006/3/11, Mark Wagner <carnildo(a)gmail.com>om>:
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