Hi Joseph and team,
summary: congratulations and some suggestions/requests.
I second and third Nate and Neil. Congratulations on meeting this
milestone. This effort can empower the research community to spend
less time on joining datasets and trying to resolve existing, known
(to some) and complex issues with mediawiki history data and instead
spend time doing the research. Nice! :)
I'm eager to see what the dataset(s) will be used for by others. On my
end, I am looking forward to seeing more research on how Wiki(m|p)edia
projects have evolved over the past almost 2 decades now that this
data is more readily available for studying. What we learn from the
Wikimedia projects and their evolution can be helpful in understanding
the broader web ecosystem and its evolution as well (as the Web is
only 30 years old now).
I have some requests if I may:
* Pine brings up a good point about licenses. It would be great to
make that clear in the documentation page(s). There are many examples
of this (that you know better than I), just in case, I find the
License section of
https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Wikidata/Maps-06-2015/en
informative, for example.
* The other request I have is that you make the template for citing
this data-set clear to the end-user in your documentation pages
(including readme). You can do this in a few different ways:
** In the documentation pages, put a suggested citation link. For
example (for bibtex):
@misc{wmfanalytics2020mediawikihistory,
title = {MediaWiki History},
author = {nameoftheauthors},
howpublished = "\url{https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/mediawiki_history/}",
note = {Accessed on date x},
year={2020}
}
** Upload a paper about the work on arxiv.org. This way, your work
gets a DOI that you can use in your documentation pages for folks to
use for citation. Note that this step can be relatively light-weight.
(no peer-review in this case and it's relatively quick.)
** Submit the paper to a conference. Some conferences have a data-set
paper track where you publish about the dataset you release. Research
is happy to support you with guidance if you need it and if you choose
to go down this path. This takes some more time and in return it will
give you a "peer-review" stamp and more experience in publishing if
you like that.
Unless you like publishing your work in a peer-reviewed venue, I
suggest one of the first two approaches.
* I'm not sure if you intend to make the dataset more discoverable
through places such as https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/ .
You may want to consider that.
Thanks,
Leila
--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 9:28 PM Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was thinking about the licensing issue some more. Apparently there
> was a relevant United States court case regarding metadata several
> years ago in the United States, but it's unclear to me from my brief
> web search whether this holding would apply to metadata from every
> nation. Also, I don't know if the underlying statues have changed
> since the time of that ruling. I think that WMF Legal should be
> consulted regarding the copyright status of the metadata. Also, I
> think that the licensing of metadata should be explicitly addressed in
> the Terms of Use or a similar document which is easily accessible to
> all contributors to Wikimedia sites.
>
> Pine
> ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
>
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 12:17 AM Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Joseph,
> >
> > Thanks for this announcement.
> >
> > I am looking for license information regarding the dumps, and I'm not
> > finding it in the pages that you linked at [1] or [2]. The license
> > that applies to text on Wikimedia sites is often CC-BY-SA 3.0, and the
> > WMF Terms of Use at https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use
> > do not appear to provide any exception for metadata. In the absence of
> > a specific license, I think that the CC-BY-SA or other relevant
> > licenses would apply to the metadata, and that the licensing
> > information should be prominently included on relevant pages and in
> > the dumps themselves.
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
> > Pine
> > ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 4:28 PM Joseph Allemandou
> > <jallemandou@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi Analytics People,
> > >
> > > The Wikimedia Analytics Team is pleased to announce the release of the most complete dataset we have to date to analyze content and contributors metadata: Mediawiki History [1] [2].
> > >
> > > Data is in TSV format, released monthly around the 3rd of the month usually, and every new release contains the full history of metadata.
> > >
> > > The dataset contains an enhanced [3] and historified [4] version of user, page and revision metadata and serves as a base to Wiksitats API on edits, users and pages [5] [6].
> > >
> > > We hope you will have as much fun playing with the data as we have building it, and we're eager to hear from you [7], whether for issues, ideas or usage of the data.
> > >
> > > Analytically yours,
> > >
> > > --
> > > Joseph Allemandou (joal) (he / him)
> > > Sr Data Engineer
> > > Wikimedia Foundation
> > >
> > > [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/mediawiki_history/readme.html
> > > [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake/Edits/Mediawiki_history_dumps
> > > [3] Many pre-computed fields are present in the dataset, from edit-counts by user and page to reverts and reverted information, as well as time between events.
> > > [4] As accurate as possible historical usernames and page-titles (as well as user-groups and blocks) is available in addition to current values, and are provided in a denormalized way to every event of the dataset.
> > > [5] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Wikistats_2
> > > [6] https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
> > > [7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/?title=Mediawiki%20History%20Dumps&projectPHIDs=Analytics-Wikistats,Analytics
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Analytics mailing list
> > > Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>
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