Data mine

From WoWWiki

To data mine is to obtain information from a game by dissecting its system files.

From Wikipedia:

Data mining (DM), also called Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD) or Knowledge-Discovery and Data Mining, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. It is a fairly recent topic in computer science but applies many older computational techniques from statistics, information retrieval, machine learning and pattern recognition.[1]

In WoW, data mining is often used to retrieve models, sounds, and other files which are in the database but inaccessible to the average user. It is strictly prohibited by Blizzard Entertainment, and content obtained through this method will be deleted if posted on the WoWWiki.