+Consider the Redirect
+=======================
+
+__ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
+
+.. figure:: seattle_redirect.png
+ :align: right
+ :figwidth: 614px
+
+ Example of a redirect displayed in the `Seattle, Washington page on
+ English Wikipedia`__ which is a redirect to `Seattle`__. Note the
+ small redirect notice below the title.
+
+__ 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.
+
+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.
+
+__ 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.
+
+.. figure:: edits_over_pages.png
+ :align: right
+ :figwidth: 614px
+
+ Histograms of pages in the article namespace based on the number of
+ edits on a log scale. The red histogram includes all pages in the
+ article namespace (N = 9,729,989). The blue graphs includes only
+ pages that were not redirects at the point of data collection (N =
+ 5,327,561).
+
+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.*
+
+__ http://mako.cc/academic/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 `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.
+
+__ 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.
+
+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
+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
+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 (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
+__ enwiki_201210-redirect_spells-v1.tsv.bz2
+
+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,
+please read `the companion paper`__.
+
+__ http://mako.cc/academic/hill_shaw-consider_the_redirect.pdf
+
+If you notice issues or bugs in our data or `code`__, contact `Benjamin
+Mako Hill`__ or `Aaron Shaw`__.
+
+__ http://projects.mako.cc/source/?p=redirect-tools
+__ http://mako.cc/contact/
+__ http://aaronshaw.org/
+
+Patches and improvements are welcome! Details on `how to produce and send
+a patch using git are online`__.
+
+__ http://projects.mako.cc/source/
+
+
projects / redirect-tools / commitdiff
