Seems like you could just yank the HTML of the wiki page and count tags, keep historical records and whip up some charts. I have zero time, but any old PHP wizard should be capable of that, right?
That will get you the table of contents as well as a few other things you don't want.
Counting tags with class "external" should get you pretty close. So, yeah, in many languages this could be done in 5 lines. You'd miss out on some of the restaurants that don't have a link, but it wouldn't be too hard to special-case those.
This guy is doing this of his own free will... he's looking for other volunteers... he's not looking to pay people to do something that he's doing voluntarily.
