[WikiEN-l] Downloading many articles

Wed Feb 23 20:50:25 UTC 2005

Stephen Forrest said:
> When
> downloading articles for editing, one would surely want the wiki
> plaintext, no?  How does one get at that automatically, short of using
> a bot?

There is a tool in Special to do this.  It should work on any Wikipedia,
not just en.
Type the following command into the search box on Wikipedia:

Special:export

Follow the straightforward instructions.  Basically you type names of
articles, one per line, into the textbox, and set the checkbox
appropriately according to whether you want only the latest version or the
whole history (all versions).  Then when you click on "Submit Query" you
will get a xml document containing what you asked for.  Your browser may
require you to "view page source" in order to get at the full XML source.
For instance here is what the start and end of my query for the current
version of "falling" and "hat" looked like.  As you can see it contains
the raw wikitext.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<mediawiki version="0.1" xml:lang="en">
  <page>
    <title>Falling</title>
    <revision>
      <timestamp>2005-02-12T23:16:39Z</timestamp>
      <contributor><username>Rich Farmbrough</username></contributor>
      <text>''For other meanings of ''fall'', see [[fall (disambiguation)]]''
----
The word '''falling''' describes movement due to [[gravity]].  By analogy,
it has other uses not directly related to gravity.
==[[sense|Sensation]]==

A [[sense|sensation]] of '''falling''' occurs when the [[Labyrinth (inner
ear)|labyrinth]] or ''vestibular apparatus'', a system of fluid-filled
passages in the [[ear|inner ear]], detects motion. The same system also
detects rotary motion.  A similar sensation of falling can be induced when
the eyes detect rapid apparent motion with respect to the environment. 
This system enables us to keep our balance by signalling when a physical
correction is necessary.
[...]

[[Category:Hats]]

[[de:Hut (Kopfbedeckung)]]
[[nl:Hoed]]</text>
    </revision>
  </page>
</mediawiki>