Please forward wherever you think appropriate.
For some time we have provided multiple numbered pages-articles bz2 file
for large wikis, as well as a single file with all of the contents combined
into one. This is consuming enough time for Wikidata that it is no longer
sustainable. For wikis where the sizes of these files to recombine is "too
large", we will skip this recombine step. This means that downloader
scripts relying on this file will need to check its existence, and if it's
not there, fall back to downloading the multiple numbered files.
I expect to get this done and deployed by the March 20th dumps run. You
can follow along here:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T179059
Thanks!
Ariel