[Wikibots-l] Retrieving page source without editing

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?

Thanks, Mark [[en:User:Carnildo]]