I have mine automated, so that I dump and reload the top 9 languages of each project into MySQL.
[..snip..]
I have the whole process of fetch, unpack, import scripted to happen unattended and aside from initial debugging, it has not failed yet in the last year or more.
Care to post a link to the script? Might be useful to others and save reinventing the wheel, especially if you can say "I want languages X, Y, Z, these are my db names, my db hostname, my username, and my password", and then it can be added to /etc/cron.daily/ , and will do a daily poll to see if there are updated successful dumps in any of those langs, and if so download, test archive validity, check MD5sum, if both look okay then unpack, import, etc - or even if it does most of the above it could be a useful starting point for people who want to have a semi-recent local copy of some Wikipedia sites that will auto-update.
-- All the best, Nick.