The JSON dump is the preferred if you want to process the entity data. From the JSON dumps, you can get the current entities (items and properties) in the current canonical format, for further processing. The XML dumps are an "opaque" exchange format for mediawiki page content. They are designed to allow content from pages in one wiki to be imported into another wiki(*), including old revisions. It can also be used for backups, since it provides a future proof way to store your wiki's content. But the format of the page content in the XML dumps is not strictly specified. It can be wikitext, or JSON data, or whatever. The JSON you find embedded of the XML dumps of wikidata may or may not be compatible with the format in the JSON file, and is subject to change without notice. It's not designed for processing by 3rd parties. Wikidata XML dumps will be generated, for all pages, including history, like it is done for all Wikimedia projects. However, this process often breaks, due to the large size of these dumps. If you want to process Wikidata items, you should use the JSON dumps. HTH -- daniel (*) this is usually disabled for wikibase entities, to avoid ID conflicts. Am 14.06.2015 um 03:38 schrieb gnosygnu: -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

Thanks for the clarification. So it looks like the JSON dumps were designed only to have entity data. I guess it was never ever meant to have other MediaWiki data, such as other namespaces, page table metadata, other tables, etc.. I guess my main question is: are there any plans to phase out the XML dump? I assume no, but given the recent problems with the XML dump process, I just wanted to make sure.