Fascinating. Would this be the first wikicite event? I see no notes of previous ones at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite

Just to clarify, the prefix that was added is ":tenwiki:", not the original proposal. So an example of a link to a page there would be "[[:tenwiki:Boulder,_Colorado]]"

I agree with @Halfak that many of the big XML dumps are very difficult to use, and a single-line JSON format could be easily parallelized by users and would be much more convenient to parse in modern languages. They should also be compressed with bz2, not gz, as noted in T115222.