I'm interested in building some applications that can try to make some sense from a given Wikipedia entry's edit history. There could be some cool integrations with Mechanical Turk or nat'l language eventually, but the basic idea is very simple for now.<p>- Has anyone seen an app that does something along these lines? (aside from WikiScanner, and more interesting than FoxyTunes Planet)
- I could have sworn I heard some noise about a Wikipedia API...was I imagining that?
- Does anyone here have a desire to work on a project like this, or have a recommendation of someone who might?
- What potential problems do you see in building something that crawls Wikipedia?<p>This ain't Powerset ;-) ...but could be cool.<p>Thanks! Hacker News is the shit...
I just found a newsgroup meme that pointed me to Wikipedia's policy on crawlers vs. using a Database download:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download</a><p>Can anyone translate this? I understand the part about not letting any crawlers ping Wikipedia more than one time per second, but what does this DB download provide and how often is it updated?