They often give the same results on smallish wikis, but I wouldn't carry that over to test wikis unless lots of content and users, logging, other table data was somehow imported in. For example a tiny user table might make mysql start INNER JOINs with that table in queries where it would never do that in production. In my experience development test wikis are often useless for estimating what query plan will happen in production.
A smallish wiki with 10ks of pages and the full history and the table data (not just revision/page/*links stuff from dumps) would probably be useful. I'm not sure where the threshold roughly starts though.
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