To whom it might concern,
I am writing in regards of the project *Cultural Diversity Observatory* and
the data we are collecting. In short, this project aims at bridging the
content gaps between language editions that relate to cultural and
geographical aspects. For this we need to retrieve data from all language
editions and Wikidata, and run some scripts in order to crawl down the
category and the link graph, in order to create some datasets and
statistics.
The reason that I am writing is because we are stuck as we cannot
automatize the scripts to retrieve data from the Replicas. We could create
the datasets few months ago but during the past months it is impossible.
We are concerned because one thing is to create the dataset once for
research purposes and another thing is to create them on monthly basis.
This is what we promised in the project grant
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/WCDO/Culture_Gap_Monthly_Monitoring>
details and now we cannot do it because of the infrastructure. It is
important to do it on monthly basis because the data visualizations and
statistics Wikipedia communities will receive need to be updated.
Lately there had been some changes in the Replicas databases and the
queries that used to take several hours are getting stuck completely. We
tried to code them in multiple ways: a) using complex queries, b) doing the
joins as code logics and in-memory, c) downloading the parts of the table
that we require and storing them in a local database. *None is an option
now *considering the current performance of the replicas.
Bryan Davis suggested that this might be a moment to consult the Analytics
team, considering the Hadoop environemnt is design to run long, complex
queries and it has massively more compute power than the Wiki Replicas
cluster. We would certainly be relieved If you considerd we could connect
to these Analytics databases (Hadoop).
Let us know if you need more information on the specific queries or the
processes we are running. The server we are using is wcdo.eqiad.wmflabs. We
will be happy to explain in detail anything you require.
Thanks.
Best regards,
Marc Miquel
PS: You can read about the method we follow to retrieve data and create the
dataset here:
*Miquel-Ribé, M., & Laniado, D. (2019). Wikipedia Cultural Diversity
Dataset: A Complete Cartography for 300 Language Editions. Proceedings of
the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. ICWSM. ACM.
2334-0770 *
wvvw.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/3260/3128/