This is a "big" question, that I don't know how to start, so I hope some of you can give me a direction. And if this is not a "good" question, I will close the thread with an apology.

I wish to go through the database of Wikipedia (let's say the English one), and do statistics. For example, I am interested in how many active editors (which should be defined) Wikipedia had at each point of time (let's say in the last 2 years).

I don't know how to build such a database, how to access it, how to know which types of data it has and so on. So my questions are:

1. What tools do I need for this (besides basic R) ? MySQL on my computer? RODBC database connection?
2. How do you start planning for such a project?