I am a 2nd PhD student working in Grouplens Research group at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Recently, I am working on a project to study how identity based and bond based theories would help understand editor's behavior in WikiProjects within the group context, but I am having a technical problems that need help and advise.

I am trying to parse each revision content of the editors from the XML dumps - the contents they added or deleted in each revision. I used the compare function in difflib to obtain the added or deleted contents by comparing two string objects, which runs extremely slow when the strings are huge specifically in the case of the Wikipedia revision contents. Without any parallel processing techniques, the expecting runtime to download and parse the 201 dumps would be ~100+ days.. I was pointed to altiscale, but not yet sure exactly how to use it for my problem.

It would be really great if anyone would give me some suggestion to help me make more progress. Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,

Bowen