MediaWiki Redirect Tools
=======================================================================
-| Author: Benjamin Mako Hill <mako@atdot.cc>
-| Homepage: http://networkcollectiv.es/wiki-redirects/
-| License: GNU GPLv3 or any later version (see COPYING)
+ | **Author:** `Benjamin Mako Hill`__ <mako@atdot.cc>
+ | **Homepage:** http://networkcollectiv.es/wiki-redirects/
+ | **License:** `GNU GPLv3 or any later version`__ (see COPYING)
+ | **Description:** Tools to to generate a redirect spells dataset from "raw" MediaWiki XML dumps like those published by the Wikimedia foundation.
-If you use this software for research, please cite the following paper in any
-resulting publication:
+__ http://mako.cc/
+__ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
- 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.
+If you use this software for research, please **cite the following
+paper** in any resulting publication:
-Overview:
+ *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.*
- These tools help you generate a redirect spells dataset from "raw" MediaWiki
- XML dumps like those published by the Wikimedia foundation.
+**Overview:**
-To uese these tools, you will need to a MediaWiki dump file. For Wikimedia
-Foundation projects, you can download them all from:
+To use these tools, you will need need to start with a MediaWiki dump
+file. For Wikimedia Foundation projects, you can download them all from:
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/
Wikis from Wikia.com and other Wikimedia projects all use the same XML format
__ https://simple.wikipedia.org/
-Before you start, you may also want to change the default directories for
-writing intermediate output files.
-
-The default directories for writing and reading files are at the top of the
-file `redirect_tools.R` and can be changed by editing that file. By default,
-all files will be written to the subdirectory "./output" in the local
-directory. If you want to use the default directories, you will still need to
-create them with a command like this::
+Before you start, you may also want to change the default directories
+for writing intermediate output files. The default directories for
+writing and reading files are at the top of the file `redirect_tools.R`
+and can be changed by editing that file. By default, all files will be
+written to the subdirectory "./output" in the local directory. If you
+want to use the default directories, you will still need to create them
+with a command like this::
mkdir output/redir output/spells
that marks every revisions as either containinig a revision, or not.
The script `01-extract_redirects.py` takes a MediaWiki dump file on STDIN and
-outputs a TSV file on STDOUT of the following form:
+outputs a TSV file on STDOUT of the following form.
+
++---------+-------------+--------------------------------+------------+---------+----------+--------------------+
+| page.id | revision.id | page.title | timestamp | deleted | redirect | target |
++=========+=============+================================+============+=========+==========+====================+
+| 1935456 | 17563584 | Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev | 1116962833 | FALSE | FALSE | NA |
+| 1935456 | 22034930 | Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev | 1125245577 | FALSE | TRUE | Mikhail Lavrentyev |
++---------+-------------+--------------------------------+------------+---------+----------+--------------------+
-> page.id revision.id page.title timestamp deleted redirect target
-> 1935456 17563584 Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev 1116962833 FALSE FALSE NA
-> 1935456 22034930 Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev 1125245577 FALSE TRUE Mikhail Lavrentyev
In this case, the first revision of the article "Mikhail Alekseevich
Lavrentiev" was not a redirect but the second is a redirect to "Mikhail
--- /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 / commitdiff