Graham Neubig schrieb:

I'm planning on using the text of Wikipedia for research purposes but I would like to remove the Wikicode, leaving only plain text. Does anyone know of scripts or programs that do this automatically?

Grahan, you could perhaps use http://www.yourserver.com/yourwiki/index.php?action=raw&title=Pagetitle to get a raw dump of that page

Graham-

I'm planning on using the text of Wikipedia for research purposes but I would like to remove the Wikicode, leaving only plain text. Does anyone know of scripts or programs that do this automatically?

I advise against using this approach, since you effectively have to parse the wikitext anyway. This especially applies to templates -- the syntax {{Abc}} dynamically includes the text {{Template:Abc}} in the page where it is used. Templates are extensively used on Wikipedia, including some with parametrized name/value substitution, and if you use the wikitext as a starting point, you will have to dynamically load and process them yourself.

I recommend generating a static HTML dump instead and converting it to plaintext, for which there are a number of tools (notably lynx -dump). There is a basic static HTML dumper in the current CVS version of MediaWiki: maintenance/dumpHTML.php - see Tim Starling's mailing list post on it: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-April/028741.html

All best,

Erik