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
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Thanks Federico. I'm cc'ing Tiziano, who has been leading this project and can chime in.
All the best, Bob
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 11:22 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do actually get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite easy to get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets to play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and could be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision deleted particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some really libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" - those revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and while there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the stuff deleted before then is available.
Regards
WSC
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Thanks Federico and WSC for the interest!
I want to specify that we used only public data released in the XML dump. As WSC said, deleted content is not always permanently removed from the database, but it is available only to users with privilege access. Our goal is not only to release the dataset, but also to give anyone the possibility to (1) reproduce the results, and (2) generate the HTML history in other languages without any special access requirements.
Tiziano
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:47 PM WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do actually get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite easy to get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets to play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and could be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision deleted particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some really libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" - those revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and while there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the stuff deleted before then is available.
Regards
WSC
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Three questions:
1) assume a page P with a Template T.
P has been modified at time T2 and T4. T has been modified at T1 and T3.
Will P be available as of T2 and T4 only, or also as of T3? (at which point it will be different than at T2 or T4).
2) What about changes to Wikidata, Commons, or UI message strings?
3) Possibly interesting to look into TimeMachine, Memento, and related work
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimeMachine https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 2:59 PM Tiziano Piccardi tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch wrote:
Thanks Federico and WSC for the interest!
I want to specify that we used only public data released in the XML dump. As WSC said, deleted content is not always permanently removed from the database, but it is available only to users with privilege access. Our goal is not only to release the dataset, but also to give anyone the possibility to (1) reproduce the results, and (2) generate the HTML history in other languages without any special access requirements.
Tiziano
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:47 PM WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do actually get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite easy
to
get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets to play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and could be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision deleted particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some really libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" -
those
revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and
while
there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the stuff deleted before then is available.
Regards
WSC
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting
the
entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Denny, thanks for the questions!
1) The time unit is article revision (namespace 0). This means that in your example, the article would be available at T2 and T4. Adding the pages also at T1 or T3 would mean to regenerate all the pages that include the article, and the resulting dataset would be significantly larger than the current 7 TB. If there is a specific need to have the complete history at such a level of granularity, the code could be adapted to store every possible change.
2) No, we used only the Wikitext available in the static XML dump. The date match is applied to templates and LUA modules. Regarding the UI message strings, if you are referring to Mediawiki interface labels, consider that we included only the content of the article as if you retrieved the page with the parameter *action=render*
3) Thank you for these pointers. I confirm that WikiPDA can be seen and a downloadable version of Memento with the bonus to have the templates matched at the time of revision creation.
On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 12:32 AM Denny Vrandečić vrandecic@gmail.com wrote:
Three questions:
- assume a page P with a Template T.
P has been modified at time T2 and T4. T has been modified at T1 and T3.
Will P be available as of T2 and T4 only, or also as of T3? (at which point it will be different than at T2 or T4).
What about changes to Wikidata, Commons, or UI message strings?
Possibly interesting to look into TimeMachine, Memento, and related work
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimeMachine https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 2:59 PM Tiziano Piccardi <tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch
wrote:
Thanks Federico and WSC for the interest!
I want to specify that we used only public data released in the XML dump. As WSC said, deleted content is not always permanently removed from the database, but it is available only to users with privilege access. Our
goal
is not only to release the dataset, but also to give anyone the possibility to (1) reproduce the results, and (2) generate the HTML
history
in other languages without any special access requirements.
Tiziano
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:47 PM WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do
actually
get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite
easy
to
get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets to play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and
could
be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision deleted particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some
really
libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" -
those
revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and
while
there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the stuff deleted before then is available.
Regards
WSC
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates, and modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently deleting
the
entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Thanks for the info! Yes, I was mostly wondering about #1. Thanks for your work!
On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 1:41 AM Tiziano Piccardi tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch wrote:
Hi Denny, thanks for the questions!
- The time unit is article revision (namespace 0). This means that in your
example, the article would be available at T2 and T4. Adding the pages also at T1 or T3 would mean to regenerate all the pages that include the article, and the resulting dataset would be significantly larger than the current 7 TB. If there is a specific need to have the complete history at such a level of granularity, the code could be adapted to store every possible change.
- No, we used only the Wikitext available in the static XML dump. The date
match is applied to templates and LUA modules. Regarding the UI message strings, if you are referring to Mediawiki interface labels, consider that we included only the content of the article as if you retrieved the page with the parameter *action=render*
- Thank you for these pointers. I confirm that WikiPDA can be seen and a
downloadable version of Memento with the bonus to have the templates matched at the time of revision creation.
On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 12:32 AM Denny Vrandečić vrandecic@gmail.com wrote:
Three questions:
- assume a page P with a Template T.
P has been modified at time T2 and T4. T has been modified at T1 and T3.
Will P be available as of T2 and T4 only, or also as of T3? (at which
point
it will be different than at T2 or T4).
What about changes to Wikidata, Commons, or UI message strings?
Possibly interesting to look into TimeMachine, Memento, and related
work
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimeMachine https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 2:59 PM Tiziano Piccardi <
tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch
wrote:
Thanks Federico and WSC for the interest!
I want to specify that we used only public data released in the XML
dump.
As WSC said, deleted content is not always permanently removed from the database, but it is available only to users with privilege access. Our
goal
is not only to release the dataset, but also to give anyone the possibility to (1) reproduce the results, and (2) generate the HTML
history
in other languages without any special access requirements.
Tiziano
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:47 PM WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
I wouldn't use the phrase "Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of
permanently
deleting the entire history of deleted pages". Quite a few "deleted" pages do
actually
get restored, and depending on the deletion process it can be quite
easy
to
get much deleted content back. Especially if someone volunteers to reference an unreferenced page or a budding footballer actually gets
to
play at professional or international level, or indeed a political candidate is elected. Almost all "deleted" content still exists and
could
be restored by a volunteer admin in the right circumstances. However Wikipedia's deletion processes are more than a little complex, many articles have incomplete histories because admins have revision
deleted
particular revisions that include copyright violations and or some
really
libellous stuff. Some of the really nasty stuff gets "oversighted" -
those
revisions are not even visible to administrators.
There is also the issue that some of the earliest material is not available. stats on admin actions only go back to December 2004, and
while
there is some content from before then, I am not sure if all the
stuff
deleted before then is available.
Regards
WSC
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 at 10:22, Federico Leva (Nemo) <
nemowiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Robert West, 11/09/20 11:29:
local instances of MediaWiki, enhanced with the capacity of correct historical macro expansion.
Interesting. I see this doesn't include deleted templates. Have you considered using historical dumps?
«We emphasize that the limitation of deleted pages, tem- plates,
and
modules is not introduced by our parsing process. Rather, it is inherited from Wikipedia’s deliberate policy of permanently
deleting
the
entire history of deleted pages.»
A relevant task is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2851
See also the various discussions about Memento, like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164654
Federico
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org