Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 December 27

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December 27

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Could someone help me with this please, the entitled posts answer is unsatisfying. I require a list of all the articles available. 27.147.226.140 (talk) 20:26, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

There are rather a lot of them! Why was the link to Special:AllPages not helpful? Do you need advice on how to use it, or were you looking for a document containing every title? That would be a very large document, but perhaps someone can generate it for you? Dbfirs 20:35, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

That list also contains non-content such as redirects. They are technically articles (hence their inclusion), but may not be the kind of thing you want included. If so, your request should specify if you want them included or not (or perhaps sit as a separate list for you to manage). Sorry, no idea who might be willing to generate that kind of thing. Matt Deres (talk) 21:18, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-all-titles-in-ns0.gz is a periodically updated gzipped list of all article titles (including redirects). -- BenRG (talk) 23:26, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I downloaded the file, what do I use to view/open? 27.147.226.140 (talk) 18:21, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Any decent unzipping program should be able to uncompress it—7-Zip, for example. Then it's just a text file, with one article name per line. You can open it in any text editor that can handle large files—Notepad++, for example. I hope you understand that it's a 260-megabyte text file with 13 million lines, and just reading it all would take months. To do anything useful with it you will probably need some specialized skills—to import it into a database, or write a program to analyze it, or whatever. -- BenRG (talk) 20:54, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, 7-Zip expands it and then it loads easily into Notepad++. Wordpad and Word will load the file, but they really struggle on my old computer. I can't see any uses except to identify articles that should be deleted and to check that similarly-named titles have only one article with redirects from the other similar names. Dbfirs 22:22, 28 December 2016 (UTC)