--- /dev/null
+Consider the Redirect
+=======================
+
+In wikis, **redirects** are special pages in that silently take readers
+from the page they are visiting to another page in in the wiki. In the
+`English Wikipedia`__, redirects make up more than half of all article
+pages.
+
+__ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
+
+.. image:: example_image
+
+Different data sources of handle redirects differently. `The MediaWiki
+API`__ will automatically "follow" redirects but the `XML database
+dumps`__ treat redirects like normal articles. In both cases, redirects
+are often invisible to reseachers.
+
+__ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
+__ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps
+
+Because redirects constitute a majority of all pages and see a large
+portion of all traffic, Wikipedia reseachers need to take redirects into
+account or their findings may be incomplete or incorrect. For example,
+the following image shows the distribution fo edits across pages in
+Wikipedia for every page, and for non-redirects only.
+
+.. image:: redirects_whatever.png
+
+Because redirects are almost never edited, the distributions are
+very different. Because redirects are viewed but almost never edited,
+any study of views over articles should also take redirects into
+account.
+
+Because redirects can change over time, the snapshots of redirects
+stored by Wikimedia and published by Wikimedia Foundation are
+incomplete. Taking redirects into account fully involves looking at the
+content of every single revision of every article to determine both
+when and where pages redirect.
+
+Much more detail can be found in `Consider the Redirect: A Missing
+Dimension of Wikipedia Research`__ — a short paper that we have written
+to acccompany this dataset and these tools. If you use this software or
+these data, we would appreciate if you cite the paper:
+
+ *Hill, Benjamin Mako and Aaron Shaw. "Consider the Redirect: A Missing
+ Dimension of Wikipedia Research." In Proceedings of the 10th
+ International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2014). ACM
+ Press, 2014.*
+
+__ hill_shaw-consider_the_redirect.pdf
+
+Generating Redirect Spells
+=============================
+
+Generating redirect spells from an MediaWiki XML dump involves two steps:
+
+1. Searching the full text of every revision of every page in a dump to
+ determine if any given revision is a redirect.
+
+2. Using the results of (1) to generate a list of "spells" that describe
+ periods of time that articles in a wiki redirect to other articles.
+
+We have software in Python and R to do these two steps under the `GNU GPL
+version 3`__. The software is designed for people already comfortable
+with working with MediaWiki XML dumps and the tools and software
+necessary to do this.
+
+__ gpl
+
+You can download the software from our git repository like::
+
+ git clone WHATEVER
+
+Detailed documentation on how to use the software is in available in our
+README file.
+
+Redirect Spell Data
+=========================
+
+In Consider the Redirect, we present an analysis of redirect data from
+English Wikipedia in the dump created on DATE. You can download the dump
+files from HERE. Because generating these dumps can be computationally
+intense, we have published the output of the software above run on the
+this dump. This includes 9,277,563 redirect spells that our software
+identified and is the dataset used in the paper.
+
+You can download the dataset in the following formats:
+
+- RData (240MB) — Suitable for use in GNU R
+- bzip2 compressed tab seperated values — Suitable
+
+More Information
+==================
+
+For details about the dataset, why it is important, and for examples on
+how it can be used to come to better findings in Wikipedia research,
+read the paper.
+
+If you notice issues or bugs in the data or script, contact `Benjamin
+Mako Hill`__ or `Aaron Shaw`__.
+
+__ http://mako.cc/contact/
+__ aarono
+
+Patches and improvements are welcome! Details on how to produce and send
+a patch using git are online here.
+
projects / redirect-tools / blobdiff