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Why not just use a dynamic database download?

Suppose you are building a piece of software that at certain points displays information that came from wikipedia. If you want your program to display the information in a different way than can be seen in the live version, you'll probably need the wikicode that is used to enter it, instead of the finished html.

Also if you want to get all of the data, you'll probably want to transfer it in the most efficient way that's possible. The wikipedia.org servers need to do quite a bit of work to convert the wikicode into html. That's time consuming both for you and for the wikipedia.org servers, so simply spidering all pages is not the way to go.

To access any article in xml, one at a time, link to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/Title_of_the_article

Read more about this at Special:Export.