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document updated 16 years ago, on Aug 23, 2008

From a high-level perspective, what are the different methods that one can get data out of a MediaWiki wiki?

download an offline database dump (if the wiki provides it)
directly access a live mirror of the database (if the wiki provides it)
methods that use the same HTTP server that normal users use
- screen scrape the HTML
- use query.php, if that extension has been installed
- use api.php, a newer version of query.php (not sure when it was included in MediaWiki, but v1.11.1 is the easliest I've seen it)
- Special:Export
  - easiest way to get the namespaces
- action=raw (example)
- action=render (displays HTML of the article only, without any wrappings)

Other database-related things

curid=### — specify the pageid, direct from the database ([eg], note that wgArticleId=2512)
if you "view source" on any page, you'll see quite a few javascript variables