Hi, you can also look at our WikiWho code, we have tested it to extract the changes between revisions considerably faster than a simple diff. see here: https://github.com/maribelacosta/wikiwho . you would have to adapt the code a bit to give you the pure diffs though. let me know if you need help. best, fabian On 20.01.2016, at 13:15, Scott Hale <computermacgyver@gmail.com<mailto:computermacgyver@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Bowen, You might compare the performance of Aaron Halfaker's deltas library: https://github.com/halfak/deltas (You might have already done so, I guess, but just in case) In either case, I suspect the tasks will need to be parallelized to be achieved in a reasonable time scale. How many editions are you working with? Cheers, Scott On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Bowen Yu <yuxxx856@umn.edu<mailto:yuxxx856@umn.edu>> wrote: Hello all, 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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Dr Scott Hale Data Scientist Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford http://www.scotthale.net/ scott.hale@oii.ox.ac.uk<mailto:scott.hale@oii.ox.ac.uk> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l Gruß, Fabian -- Fabian Flöck Research Associate Computational Social Science department @GESIS Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208 fabian.floeck@gesis.org<mailto:fabian.floeck@gesis.org> www.gesis.org www.facebook.com/gesis.org

Thanks for all the suggestions you shared! @ Aaron, it would be great if you can share me the dataset you have. I think 20150602 is fairly new. In the meanwhile, I will explore the utilities you mentioned. Think they are good stuff to learn and practice. Thanks! On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Aaron Halfaker &lt;aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: