Benjamin Mako Hill
d4111dc4f3
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>
(cherry picked from commit d6d0aab604)
94 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
# mediawiki_dump_tools
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Tools for converting MediaWiki XML database dumps—the "history" dumps
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that include every revision of every page—into tabular datasets for
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research. The main tool is `wikiq`, a command line program that produces
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one row per revision with metadata such as the page, namespace,
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timestamp, editor, text size, and revert status, plus a range of
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optional computed columns.
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## Installation
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wikiq requires Python 3.11 or later. Install it with pip from a clone of
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this repository:
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git clone https://gitea.communitydata.science/collective/mediawiki_dump_tools.git
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cd mediawiki_dump_tools
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pip install .
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[uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) works too (`uv sync`) and is convenient
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for development, but it is not required.
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One dependency, `pywikidiff2`, is installed from source and compiles a
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C++ extension, so a C++ compiler must be available at install time.
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Wikimedia dumps are usually compressed as 7z (most common), gz, or bz2.
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wikiq reads these by running your system's decompression tools, so it
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depends on `7za`, `zcat`, and `bzcat` for those respective formats. On
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Debian or Ubuntu, `apt install 7zip` provides `7za`; the others are
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standard.
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## Usage
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wikiq dump.xml.7z -o output/
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Each output row describes one revision. The output format follows the
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`-o` argument: a path ending in `.jsonl` produces JSON Lines, anything
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else produces tab-separated values. With no dump file argument, wikiq
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reads XML on stdin and writes to stdout.
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The most commonly useful options (`wikiq --help` describes them all):
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- `-n ID` limits output to a namespace, and can be given more than once.
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`-rr N` sets how many prior edits are checked when detecting reverts.
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- `--collapse-user` collapses each sequence of consecutive edits by the
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same user into a single row, which can address problems with text
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persistence measures.
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- `-p [METHOD]` computes content persistence measures for each revision:
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persistent token revisions, tokens added, and tokens removed. The
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available methods are `sequence` (the default), `segment` (robust to
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content moves but slower), `wikidiff2` (like segment, using the
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wikidiff2 diff engine), and `legacy` (the behavior of older research
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projects). Persistence is the slowest thing wikiq computes.
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- `-d` outputs a structured diff for each revision; `-t` outputs the
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full revision text.
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- `--external-links`, `--citations`, `--wikilinks`, `--templates`, and
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`--headings` parse each revision's wikitext and add a column with the
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extracted elements.
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- `-RP REGEX -RPl LABEL` searches revision text for a regular expression
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and reports the matches in a column named by the label; repeat the
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pair for multiple patterns. `-CP`/`-CPl` do the same for edit
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summaries. Adding `-RPc` or `-CPc` reports the number of matches
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instead of the matched text.
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- `--resume` continues an interrupted run from the last complete line of
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an existing JSONL output file. Combined with `--time-limit HOURS`,
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this supports processing very large dumps in bounded chunks.
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- `--print-schema` prints a Spark-compatible JSON schema for the
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configured output and exits.
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## Tests
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From the repository root:
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uv run pytest test/
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Run the suite from the root—some tests open fixture files by paths
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relative to it. The full suite processes several real dumps from
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`test/dumps/` and takes around fifteen minutes; expected outputs live in
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`test/baseline_output/`.
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## Authors
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wikiq is written and maintained by members of the [Community Data
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Science Collective](https://wiki.communitydata.science/). Contributors
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include Benjamin Mako Hill, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Will Beason, Sohyeon
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Hwang, and Kaylea Champion. It builds on earlier versions of the tool
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written in Python and in C++ by Benjamin Mako Hill.
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## License
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wikiq is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
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the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
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Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
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option) any later version. See [COPYING](COPYING) for the full text.
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