+++ /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