MediaWiki Redirect Tools
=======================================================================
- | **Author:** `Benjamin Mako Hill`__ <mako@atdot.cc>
+ | **Author:** `Benjamin Mako Hill`__ <mako@atdot.cc> and `Aaron Shaw`__ <aaron.d.shaw@gmail.com>
| **Homepage:** http://networkcollectiv.es/wiki-redirects/
- | **License:** `GNU GPLv3 or any later version`__ (see COPYING)
+ | **Code:** http://projects.mako.cc/source/?p=redirect-tools
+ | **License:** `GNU GPLv3 or any later version`__
| **Description:** Tools to to generate a redirect spells dataset from "raw" MediaWiki XML dumps like those published by the Wikimedia foundation.
__ http://mako.cc/
+__ http://aaronshaw.org/
__ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
-If you use this software for research, please **cite the following
-paper** in any resulting publication:
+If you use this software for research, please cite the following
+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, 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.*
**Overview:**
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; output/redir; output/spells
+ mkdir output output/redir output/spells
-Step 2: Find Redirects in Revisions
-=======================================================================
+Step 1: Find Redirects in Revisions
+-----------------------------------------
Dependencies:
- bzip2 compressed TSV files (one line per revision)
-You will run the `01-extract_redirects.py` script to build a dataset of revisions or edits that marks every revisions as either containinig a revision, or not.
-
-Then, the script `01-extract_redirects.py` will take a MediaWiki dump file on STDIN and output a TSV file on STDOUT of the following form.
+You will run the `01-extract_redirects.py` script to build a dataset of revisions or edits that marks every revisions as either containing a redirect, or not. `01-extract_redirects.py` takes a MediaWiki dump file on STDIN and output a TSV file on STDOUT of the following form:
+---------+-------------+--------------------------------+------------+---------+----------+--------------------+
| page.id | revision.id | page.title | timestamp | deleted | redirect | target |
In this (example) case, the first revision of the article "Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev" was not a redirect but the second is a redirect to "Mikhail Lavrentyev."
-If you are using the Simple English dump (which is a single file) you would run the following command to send the output to the default destination::
+If you are using the Simple English dump (which is a single file) you would run the following command to uncompress the dump, parse it using our script, compress the output again, and save the output to the default destination::
7za x -so simplewiki-20140410-pages-meta-history.xml.7z |
python2.7 01-extract_redirects.py | bzip2 -c - > output/redir/simple_redirs.tsz.bz2
Step 2: Generate spells
-=======================================================================
+-----------------------------------------
Dependencies:
- GNU R
- data.table (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/)
-- foriegn (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreign/)
+- foreign (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreign/)
Input:
R --no-save < 02-generate_spells.R
-By default, output will be saved into `output/spells`.
+By default, output will be saved into `output/spells`. The script will
+save three versions of the output:
-The
+1. `redirect_spells.RData` — An RData file suitable for use in GNU R
+2. `redirect_spells.tsv` — A tab seperated values file suitable for use in a variety of different programs.
+3. `redirect_spells.dta` — A DTA file suitable for use in Stata (many versions will crop very long artiicle titles due to limitations in the DTA format).
-Running Code in Parallel
-=======================================================================
-Because the full history dumps from the WMF foundation are split into many
-files, it is can be appropriate to parse these dumps in parallel. Although the
-specific ways you choose to do this will vary by the queuing system you use,
-we've included examples of the scripts we used with Condor on the Harvard/MIT
-Data Center (HMDC) in the "examples/" directory. They will not work without
-modification for your computing environment because they have our environment
-hardcoded in but they will give you an idea of where you might want to start.
-
-Additionally, there is a third step `03-assemble_redirect_spells.R` that
-contains R code that will read in all of the separate RData files, assmebles
-the many smaller dataframes into a single data.frame, and then saves that
-unified data.frame into a single RData file.
+Running Code in Parallel
+-----------------------------------------
+
+Because the full history dumps from the WMF foundation are split into
+many files, it is usually appropriate to parse these dumps in
+parallel. Although the specific ways you choose to do this will vary
+by the queuing or scheduling system you use, we've included examples
+of the scripts we used with Condor on the Harvard/MIT Data Center
+(HMDC) in the `examples/` directory of the source code. They will not
+work without modification for your computing environment because they
+have configuration options and paths for our environment
+hardcoded. That said, they may give you an idea of where you might
+want to start.
+
+In this parallel code there is a third file
+`03-assemble_redirect_spells.R` that contains R code that will read in
+all of the separate RData files created in paralell processing,
+assemble the many smaller dataframes into a single dataframe, and then
+saves that unified data.frame into a single RData file.
__ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle,_Washington
__ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle
-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.
+In wikis, **redirects** are special pages in that silently take
+readers from the page they are visiting to another page in the
+wiki. In the `English Wikipedia`__, redirects make up more than half
+of all article pages.
-Different data sources of handle redirects differently. For example,
-`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.
+Different Wikipedia data sources handle redirects differently. For
+example, `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 researchers.
__ 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 histogram on this page shows the distribution fo edits across pages
-in Wikipedia for every page, and for non-redirects only. Because
-redirects are almost never edited, the distributions are very different.
-Similarly, because redirects are viewed but almost never edited, any
-study of views over articles should also take redirects into account.
+portion of all traffic, Wikipedia researchers need to take redirects
+into account or their findings may be incomplete or incorrect. For
+example, the histogram on this page shows the distribution of edits
+across pages in Wikipedia for every page, and for non-redirects only.
+Because redirects are almost never edited, the distributions are
+very different. Similarly, because redirects are viewed but almost
+never edited, any study of views over articles should also take
+redirects into account.
.. figure:: edits_over_pages.png
:align: right
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
+to accompany 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
We have `publicly released 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. We have provided
-`documentation`__ on how to use these tools.
+tools and software necessary to do this.
__ http://projects.mako.cc/source/?p=redirect-tools
__ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
-__ README.html
You can download the software from our git repository like::
git clone git://projects.mako.cc/redirect-tools
-Detailed documentation on how to use the software is in available in our
-README file.
+Detailed documentation on how to use the software is in available in `our
+README file`__.
+
+__ README.html
Redirect Spell Data
=========================
-In our paper `Consider the Redirect`__, we present an analysis of
-redirect data from English Wikipedia in the dump created in October
+In `our paper`__, we present an analysis of redirect data from English
+Wikipedia in the dump created in October
2012. You can download `the dump files we used`__ from `the Wikimedia
Foundation dataset archive`__. Because generating these dumps can be
computationally intense, we have published the output of the software
You can download the dataset in the following formats:
-- `RData (240MB)`__ — Suitable for use in GNU R
-- `bzip2 compressed tab seperated values (178MB)`__ — Suitable for use
+- `RData (240MB)`__ — Suitable for use in `GNU R`__
+- `bzip2 compressed tab separated values (178MB)`__ — Suitable for use
in other languages and statistical packages.
__ http://mako.cc/academic/hill_shaw-consider_the_redirect.pdf
__ http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20121001/
__ http://dumps.wikimedia.org/
__ enwiki_201210-redirect_spells-v1.RData
+__ http://www.r-project.org/
__ enwiki_201210-redirect_spells-v1.tsv.bz2
More Information
__ http://projects.mako.cc/source/
+----
+
+ⓒ Copyright `Benjamin Mako Hill`__ and `Aaron Shaw`__ :: `Creative Commons BY-SA`__ :: Updated: Thu Jul 3 13:22:29 PDT 2014
+
+__ http://mako.cc/academic/
+__ http://aaronshaw.org/
+__ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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