We used a python mysql library to access the article text and it was quite fast. The critical step for increased speed was the following index:

dbCursor.execute("ALTER TABLE page ADD INDEX (page_title);")

We've got several thousands lines of python code that is already GPL'ed (since the copyleft goes at the top, it's the first code I write ;) and will be released at Wikimania.

On 7/2/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
It is nice that the pywikipediabot provides certain functionality. The question is how usable is it in the first place when this info is needed interactively. Also when there are more tools that provide a great job, we will get a situation where advances in one tool will egg on the people of another tool to do even better.

Thanks,
    GerardM



On 7/2/07, Brian < Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu> wrote:
Pywikipediabot provides this functionality under a free license.

/Brian


On 7/2/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com > wrote:
Why don't you release this under a free license so that the Wikimedia
Foundation could use it?

On Jul 2, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Torsten Zesch wrote:

>
>                JWPL - Java Wikipedia Library
>
>              version 0.3 beta is now available
>
>         http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/JWPL
>
>
> INTRODUCTION
>
> Lately, Wikipedia has been recognized as a promising lexical
> semantic resource. We present JWPL, a free Java-based Wikipedia
> application programming interface, that enables the use of
> Wikipedia as a NLP resource by providing efficient programmatic
> access to the knowledge therein.
>
>
> FUNCTIONALITY
>
> Fast access to:
>  * article text
>  * categories
>  * redirects
>  * links between articles (ingoing and outgoing).
>
> Discrimination between
>  * article pages
>  * disambiguation pages
>  * redirect pages.
>
> Available languages:
>  * English
>  * German
>  * Czech
>  * Ukrainian
>
> Other languages will be added step by step.
>
>
> DOWNLOAD
>
> JWPL Java library
> http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/JWPL
>
> Wikipedia data
> (with database scheme optimized for large-scale NLP tasks)
> ftp://ftp.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/tud/informatik/JWPL_data
>
>
> LICENCE
>
> JWPL is free for non-profit and non-commercial use.
>
>
> ABOUT
>
> JWPL was developed by the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab
> at Darmstadt University of Technlogy.
>
> http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>


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