As I understand it, the goal being discussed is to make a list of redirects with long edit histories. This does not require downloading the full text of each revision. It only requires the contents of the 'revision' and 'page' database tables, both of which are available in the database dumps:
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20080312/enwiki-20080312-stub-meta-hist... (6.7gb) http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20080312/enwiki-20080312-page.sql.gz (385 MB)
- Carl