update README for the current tool

Describe what wikiq is and rewrite the installation, usage, and test
instructions to match the current code: pip or uv installation from the
gitea repository, the Python 3.11 requirement, output format selection
by extension, and the current option set including persistence methods,
wikitext extraction, regex matching and counting, and JSONL resume. Add
an authors section crediting the Community Data Science Collective
contributors and the earlier Python and C++ versions of the tool.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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When you install this from git, you will need to first clone the
repository:
# mediawiki_dump_tools
git clone git://projects.mako.cc/mediawiki_dump_tools
Tools for converting MediaWiki XML database dumps—the "history" dumps
that include every revision of every page—into tabular datasets for
research. The main tool is `wikiq`, a command line program that produces
one row per revision with metadata such as the page, namespace,
timestamp, editor, text size, and revert status, plus a range of
optional computed columns.
From within the repository working directory, initiatlize and set up the
submodule like:
## Installation
git submodule init
git submodule update
wikiq requires Python 3.11 or later. Install it with pip from a clone of
this repository:
Wikimedia dumps are usually in a compressed format such as 7z (most
common), gz, or bz2. Wikiq uses your computer's compression software to
read these files. Therefore wikiq depends on `7za`, `gzcat`, and `zcat`.
git clone https://gitea.communitydata.science/collective/mediawiki_dump_tools.git
cd mediawiki_dump_tools
pip install .
# Dependencies
[uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) works too (`uv sync`) and is convenient
for development, but it is not required.
These non-Python dependencies must be installed on your system for wikiq
and its associated tests to work.
One dependency, `pywikidiff2`, is installed from source and compiles a
C++ extension, so a C++ compiler must be available at install time.
- 7zip
- ffmpeg
Wikimedia dumps are usually compressed as 7z (most common), gz, or bz2.
wikiq reads these by running your system's decompression tools, so it
depends on `7za`, `zcat`, and `bzcat` for those respective formats. On
Debian or Ubuntu, `apt install 7zip` provides `7za`; the others are
standard.
A new diff engine based on [wikidiff2](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidiff2)
can be used for word-persistence. Wikiq can also output the diffs
between each page revision. This requires installing Wikidiff 2 on your
system. On Debian or Ubuntu Linux this can be done via.
## Usage
`apt-get install php-wikidiff2`
wikiq dump.xml.7z -o output/
You may have to also run. `sudo phpenmod wikidiff2`.
Each output row describes one revision. The output format follows the
`-o` argument: a path ending in `.jsonl` produces JSON Lines, anything
else produces tab-separated values. With no dump file argument, wikiq
reads XML on stdin and writes to stdout.
# Tests
The most commonly useful options (`wikiq --help` describes them all):
To run tests:
- `-n ID` limits output to a namespace, and can be given more than once.
`-rr N` sets how many prior edits are checked when detecting reverts.
- `--collapse-user` collapses each sequence of consecutive edits by the
same user into a single row, which can address problems with text
persistence measures.
- `-p [METHOD]` computes content persistence measures for each revision:
persistent token revisions, tokens added, and tokens removed. The
available methods are `sequence` (the default), `segment` (robust to
content moves but slower), `wikidiff2` (like segment, using the
wikidiff2 diff engine), and `legacy` (the behavior of older research
projects). Persistence is the slowest thing wikiq computes.
- `-d` outputs a structured diff for each revision; `-t` outputs the
full revision text.
- `--external-links`, `--citations`, `--wikilinks`, `--templates`, and
`--headings` parse each revision's wikitext and add a column with the
extracted elements.
- `-RP REGEX -RPl LABEL` searches revision text for a regular expression
and reports the matches in a column named by the label; repeat the
pair for multiple patterns. `-CP`/`-CPl` do the same for edit
summaries. Adding `-RPc` or `-CPc` reports the number of matches
instead of the matched text.
- `--resume` continues an interrupted run from the last complete line of
an existing JSONL output file. Combined with `--time-limit HOURS`,
this supports processing very large dumps in bounded chunks.
- `--print-schema` prints a Spark-compatible JSON schema for the
configured output and exits.
python -m unittest test.Wikiq_Unit_Test
## Tests
## TODO:
From the repository root:
1. \[\] Output metadata about the run. What parameters were used? What
versions of deltas?
2. \[\] Url encoding by default
uv run pytest test/
Run the suite from the root—some tests open fixture files by paths
relative to it. The full suite processes several real dumps from
`test/dumps/` and takes around fifteen minutes; expected outputs live in
`test/baseline_output/`.
## Authors
wikiq is written and maintained by members of the [Community Data
Science Collective](https://wiki.communitydata.science/). Contributors
include Benjamin Mako Hill, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Will Beason, Sohyeon
Hwang, and Kaylea Champion. It builds on earlier versions of the tool
written in Python and in C++ by Benjamin Mako Hill.
## License