Hi all,
*TL;DR:*
So far, Wikipedia's full revision history has been available only in wiki markup, not in HTML -- a big limitation for researchers. We are changing this by releasing WikiHist.html, Wikipedia's full history (up until March 2019) in HTML: https://zenodo.org/record/3605388 https://t.co/ZhK7kKaPCi?amp=1 Caveat emptor: 7 TB!
Tweet: https://twitter.com/cervisiarius/status/1301791239558311936
*More details:*
Wikipedia is written in the wikitext markup language. When serving content, the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia parses wikitext to HTML, thereby inserting additional content by expanding macros (templates and modules). Hence, researchers who intend to analyze Wikipedia as seen by its readers should work with HTML, rather than wikitext. Since Wikipedia’s revision history is made publicly available by the Wikimedia Foundation exclusively in wikitext format, researchers have had to produce HTML themselves, typically by using Wikipedia’s REST API for ad-hoc wikitext-to-HTML parsing. This approach, however, (1) does not scale to very large amounts of data and (2) does not correctly expand macros in historical article revisions.
We have solved these problems by developing a parallelized architecture for parsing massive amounts of wikitext using local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion. By deploying our system, we produce and hereby release WikiHist.html, English Wikipedia’s full revision history in HTML format. It comprises the HTML content of 580M revisions of 5.8M articles generated from the full English Wikipedia history spanning 18 years from 1 January 2001 to 1 March 2019. Boilerplate content such as page headers, footers, and navigation sidebars are not included in the HTML.
For more details, please refer to https://zenodo.org/record/3605388 https://t.co/ZhK7kKaPCi?amp=1 and to the dataset paper:
Blagoj Mitrevski, Tiziano Piccardi, and Robert West: WikiHist.html: English Wikipedia’s Full Revision History in HTML Format. In *Proceedings of the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media,* 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10256
Best regards, Bob