How can I get the full change history for an article on Wikipedia?

Question

I'd like a way to download the content of every page in the history of a popular article on Wikipedia. In other words I want to get the full contents of every edit for a single article. How would I go about doing this?

Is there a simple way to do this using the Wikipedia API. I looked and didn't find anything the popped out as a simple solution. I've also looked into the scripts on the PyWikipedia Bot page (http://botwiki.sno.cc/w/index.php?title=Template:Script&oldid=3813) and didn't find anything that was useful. Some simple way to do it in Python or Java would be the best, but I'm open to any simple solution that will get me the data.

Answer 1

Well, one solution is to parse the Wikipedia XML dump.

Just thought I'd put that out there.

If you're only getting one page, that's overkill. But if you don't need the very very latest information, using the XML would have the advantage of being a one-time download instead of repeated network hits.

Answer 2

There are multiple options for this. You can use the Special:Export special page to fetch an XML stream of the page history. Or you can use the API, found under /w/api.php. Use action=query&title=$TITLE&prop=revisions&rvprop=timestamp|user|content etc. to fetch the history. Pywikipedia provides an interface to this, but I do not know by heart how to call it. An alternative library for Python, mwclient, also provides this, via site.pages[page_title].revisions()