New subject: [Wikitech-l] Change for abstracts dumps, primarily for wikidata

4 Apr 2018


      Those of you that rely on the abstracts dumps will have noticed that the
content for wikidata is pretty much useless.  It doesn't look like a
summary of the page because main namespace articles on wikidata aren't
paragraphs of text. And there's really no useful summary to be generated,
even if we were clever.
We have instead decided to produce abstracts output only for pages in the
main namespace that consist of text. For pages that are of type
wikidata-item, json and so on, the <abstract> tag will contain the
attribute 'not-applicable' set to the empty string. This impacts a very few
pages on other wikis; for the full list and for more information on this
change, see  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178047
We hope this change will be merged in a week or so; it won't take effect
for wikidata until the next dumps run on April 20th, since the wikidata
abstracts are already in progress.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Ariel