This isn't new - it's probably Wikipedia's best kept secret though. It first got saved to del.icio.us in November 2006: <a href="http://del.icio.us/url/08d335d4c1d2f491cc70e1bf61e5d880" rel="nofollow">http://del.icio.us/url/08d335d4c1d2f491cc70e1bf61e5d880</a>
What format do they use? It looks like neither SOAP nor XML-RPC. It looks more like some home-brew XML-dialect.<p>Are they reinventing the wheel, and if so, why?
You can also get the MySQL dumps (and have been able to for awhile):<p><a href="http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/" rel="nofollow">http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download</a>
Wikipedia bots (ex. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot</a>) have been using this for a while (at least a year).
It's still a work in progress I think. It was hard to find for me too, when I built <a href="http://www.wikirandom.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikirandom.org</a>