Still not totally convinced this is finished, since it took such a long time. I started with the 2025-01 FIDE XML players list, culled it with a ChatGPT-generated Python script so that only players rated 2000+ were included. Then converted that to XLSX (amongst other formats) and copied out the column in that spreadsheet for the FIDE IDs of those players. Then, with another Python script, I was able to download a JSON file for each player from the FIDE API, using a wrapper from a GitHub repository. These JSON files have all the information for those players. Not just general information, but the ratings and number of games for every month that they have a rating for. So these files turned out to be pretty long. The next step was converting all of those to a new XML players list, which includes all the history, as well as the general information. Even though the number of players is drastically reduced to only a bit more than 19,000, still the new XML players list is about twice the size of the old one. I did make sure to streamline the elements, so that, as much as possible, they resemble the elements in the regular players list.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/enoh1ljui47g305/fide-ratings-and-history-2000+-240115.zip/file
The size of the ZIP is about 40 MB, and oddly the size of the XML file is about 1.2 GB. I’m not sure how it compressed so well, but it seems to have done so.