Not a silly question at all, as there are many options.
Il 06/02/22 18:33, Hugh Barnard via Xmldatadumps-l ha scritto:
I'd like XML or HTML, no images, to make a crawl of UK local elections, [...]
It sounds like an exploratory phase where you may benefit from a higher-level look at the data access options. See also: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Get_the_contents_of_a_page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access
The database dumps are only useful after you've identified what exactly you need to extract from the database and how.
Federico