This page describes the data set dump of the denormalized revision, user and page history of all WMF's wikis. It is computed from the MediaWiki History dataset, lives in the Analytics Hadoop cluster, and is downloadable from MediaWiki Dumps. A new monthly snapshot containing all history is being produced at the beginning of each month.

General Information

Content

This data set contains a historical record of revision (without text), user and page events of Wikimedia wikis since 2001. The data is denormalized, meaning that all events for user, page and revision are stored in the same schema. This leads to some fields being always null for some events (for instance fields about page are null in events about user). Events about users and pages have been processed to rebuild an as coherent as possible history in term of user-renames and page-moves (see Page and user history reconstruction). Also, some data have been preprocessed to facilitate analyses, such as edit-count per user and per page, reverting and reverted revisions and more.

Updates

The updates for this data set are monthly, around the end of the month's first week. Each update contains a full dump since 2001 (the beginning of MediaWiki-time) up to the current month. The reason for this particularity is the underlying data, the MediaWiki databases. Every time a user gets renamed, a revision reverted, a page moved, etc. the existing related records in the logging table are updated accordingly. So an event triggered today may change the state of that table 10 years ago. And it turns out the logging table is the base of the MediaWiki history reconstruction process. Thus, note that incremental downloads of these dumps may generate inconsistent data. Consider using [[1]] for real time updates on MediaWiki changes(API docs).

Versioning

Each update receives the name of the last featured month, in YYYY-MM format. For example if the dump spans from 2001 to August 2019 (included), it will be named 2019-08 even if it will be released on the first days of September 2019. There is a folder for each available month at the root of the download URL, and for storage reasons only the last two versions are available. This shouldn't be problematic as every version contains the whole historical dataset.

Partitioning

The data is organized by wiki and time range. This way it can be downloaded for a single wiki (or set of wikis). The time split is necessary because of file size reasons. There are 3 different time range splits: monthly, yearly and all-time. Very big wikis are partitioned monthly, while medium wikis are partitioned yearly, and small wikis are dumped in one single file. This way we ensure that files are not larger than ~2GB, and at the same time we prevent generating a very large number of files.

Wikis partitioned monthly: wikidatawiki, commonswiki, enwiki.
Wikis partitioned yearly: dewiki, frwiki, eswiki, itwiki, ruwiki, jawiki, viwiki, zhwiki, ptwiki, enwiktionary, plwiki, nlwiki, svwiki, metawiki, arwiki, shwiki, cebwiki, mgwiktionary, fawiki, frwiktionary, ukwiki, hewiki, kowiki, srwiki, trwiki, loginwiki, huwiki, cawiki, nowiki, mediawikiwiki, fiwiki, cswiki, idwiki, rowiki, enwikisource, frwikisource, ruwiktionary, dawiki, bgwiki, incubatorwiki, enwikinews, specieswiki, thwiki.
Wikis in one single file: all the others.

File format

The file format is tab-separated-value (TSV) instead of JSON in order to reduce the file sizes (JSON repeats field names for every record). Most fields of the schema are atomic (integer, string, boolean...), and a few are arrays of strings.

Some details:

Undefined or null values are represented as an empty fields, again to make data lighter
Encoding of string-arrays is value1,value2,...,valueN with commas escaped in values.
In text fields, carriage-returns, line-feed and tabulations are escaped with a \ to keep a valid TSV format

The files are compressed in Bzip2, for it being widely used, free software, and having a high compression rate. Note that with Bzip2, you can concatenate several compressed files and treat them as a single Bzip2 file.

Directory structure

When choosing a file (or set of files) to download, the URL should look like this:

/<version>/<wiki>/<version>.<wiki>.<time range>.tsv.bz2

Where

<version> is the YYYY-MM formatted snapshot i.e. 2019-08;
<wiki> is the wiki database name, i.e. enwiki or commonswiki;
<time_range> is either YYYY-MM for big wikis, YYYY for medium wikis, or all-time for the rest (see partitionning above).

Examples of dump files:

/2019-12/wikidatawiki/2019-12.wikidatawiki.2019-05.tsv.bz2
/2019-12/ptwiki/2019-12.ptwiki.2018.tsv.bz2
/2019-12/cawikinews/2019-12.cawikinews.all-time.tsv.bz2

Technical Documentation

Note: In the documentation below, "current" refers to the time of the snapshot, and "historical" to the time of the event. A subpage here lists answers to some frequently answered questions: Analytics/Data Lake/Edits/Mediawiki history dumps/FAQ.

Access

The easiest way to play with dumps is to use PAWS. See these example notebooks.

You can access the dumps through Toolforge. If you have a Cloud VPS instance, you can add the mount_nfs role to get the /public/dumps/public mount. But you also need to enable the mount server-side, see this patch for example. See Portal:Data_Services/Admin/Runbooks/Enable_NFS_for_a_project for full details.

Schema overview

The dataset contains many fields (70 to be precise), but there is some structure helping in making sense of them. The fields can be divided in 5 classes:

event global fields -- They are used on every event of the dataset (wiki_db, event_entity, event_type, event_timestamp, event_comment).
event user fields -- They provide information on the user having performed the event. They are set for all events in the dataset except when denormalizing user data has failed.
page fields -- They provide information about the page the event applies to. They are set for page events (event_entity = 'page') and revision events (event_entity = 'revision').
user fields -- They provide information about the user the event applies to. They are set for user events only (event_entity = 'user').
revision fields -- They provide information about the revision the event applies to. They are set for revision events only (event_entity = 'revision').

Note: Except for the event global class fields whose prefix is not consistent, all other have their field name prefixed with their field class.

Important fields: event_entity and event_type

Due to having user, page and revision events in the same dataset (it is said to be denormalized), filtering by event_entity and possibly even event_type is necessary not to mix incompatible data.

Entity	Event type	Meaning
revision	create	Editing a page
page	create	Creating a page
	create-page	Page creation according to the logging table [note 1 below]
	delete	Deleting a page
	move	Changing a page's title
	restore	Undeleting a page
	merge	Merging revisions from another page [note 2 below]
user	create	Registering of a new account
	rename	Changing the name of a user
	altergroups	Changing the groups (rights) of a user
	alterblocks	Blocking/unblocking a user

note 1: Establishing exactly when a page was created is not simple. The logging table has a record for page creation, and we expose this in our datasets as a "create-page" event. However, the first revision for some pages is *before* this logging table entry. Therefore, we made a decision to use that event as the "create". You can follow along with our logic at PageHistoryBuilder #L778 and at PageEventBuilder #L180.
note 2: we don't process merges much, and the documentation is sparse: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Log_actions

Schema details

Field class	Field name	Data type	Comment
Event_global	wiki_db	string	enwiki, dewiki, eswiktionary, etc.
	event_entity	string	revision, user or page
	event_type	string	create, move, delete, etc. Detailed explanation in the docs under #Event_types
	event_timestamp	string	When this event ocurred
	event_comment	string	Comment related to this event, sourced from log_comment, rev_comment, etc.
Event user	event_user_id	bigint	ID of the user that caused the event. Null if the user is anonymous or if from a revision where the user has been revision deleted.
	event_user_text_historical	string	Historical username (IP address for anonymous user) of the user that caused the event. Null for revisions where the user has been revision deleted.
	event_user_text	string	Current username of the user that caused the event. Null for anonymous users (the IP is stored in event_user_text_historical). Null for revisions where the user has been revision deleted.
	event_user_blocks_historical	array<string>	Historical blocks of the user that caused the event
	event_user_blocks	array<string>	Current blocks of the user that caused the event
	event_user_groups_historical	array<string>	Historical groups of the user that caused the event
	event_user_groups	array<string>	Current groups of the user that caused the event
	event_user_is_bot_by_historical	array<string>	Historical bot information of the user that caused the event, can contain values name or group
	event_user_is_bot_by	array<string>	Bot information of the user that caused the event, can contain values name or group
	event_user_is_created_by_self	boolean	Whether the event_user created their own account
	event_user_is_created_by_system	boolean	Whether the event_user account was created by mediawiki (eg. centralauth)
	event_user_is_created_by_peer	boolean	Whether the event_user account was created by another user
	event_user_is_anonymous	boolean	Whether the event_user is not registered, using the old way that surfaced the IP publicly. True for revisions where the user has been revision deleted, even if the user was actually registered.
	event_user_is_temporary	boolean	Whether the event_user is not registered, using the new temporary account way. True for revisions where the user has been revision deleted, even if the user was actually registered.
	event_user_is_permanent	boolean	Whether the event_user is registered.
	event_user_registration_timestamp	string	Registration timestamp of the user that caused the event (from user table)
	event_user_creation_timestamp	string	Creation timestamp of the user that caused the event (from logging table)
	event_user_first_edit_timestamp	string	Timestamp of the first edit of the user that caused the event
event_user_revision_count	bigint	Number of revisions made by the `event_user` up to the historical time in this `wiki_db` (only available in revision-create events so far). For revision-create events, this includes the event itself.
event_user_seconds_since_previous_revision	bigint	In revision events: seconds elapsed since the previous revision made by the current event_user_id (only available in revision-create events so far)
page	page_id	bigint	In revision/page events: id of the page
	page_title_historical	string	In revision/page events: historical title of the page
	page_title	string	In revision/page events: current title of the page
	page_namespace_historical	int	In revision/page events: historical namespace of the page.
	page_namespace_is_content_historical	boolean	In revision/page events: historical namespace of the page is categorized as content
	page_namespace	int	In revision/page events: current namespace of the page
	page_namespace_is_content	boolean	In revision/page events: current namespace of the page is categorized as content
	page_is_redirect	boolean	In revision/page events: whether the page is currently a redirect
	page_is_deleted	boolean	In revision/page events: Whether the page is rebuilt from a delete event
	page_creation_timestamp	string	In revision/page events: creation timestamp of the page
	page_first_edit_timestamp	string	In revision/page events: timestamp of the page's first revision. Can be before the page_creation in some restore/merge cases (see revision_is_from_before_page_creation).
	page_revision_count	bigint	In revision/page events: Cumulative revision count per page for the current page_id (only available in revision-create events so far)
	page_seconds_since_previous_revision	bigint	In revision/page events: seconds elapsed since the previous revision made on the current page_id (only available in revision-create events so far)
user	user_id	bigint	In user events: id of the user
	user_text_historical	string	In user events: historical username or IP address of the user
	user_text	string	In user events: current username or IP address of the user
	user_blocks_historical	array<string>	In user events: historical user blocks
	user_blocks	array<string>	In user events: current user blocks
	user_groups_historical	array<string>	In user events: historical user groups
	user_groups	array<string>	In user events: current user groups
	user_is_bot_by_historical	array<string>	In user events: Historical bot information of the user, can contain values name or group
	user_is_bot_by	array<string>	In user events: Bot information of the user, can contain values name or group
	user_is_created_by_self	boolean	In user events: whether the user created their own account
	user_is_created_by_system	boolean	In user events: whether the user account was created by mediawiki
	user_is_created_by_peer	boolean	In user events: whether the user account was created by another user
	user_is_anonymous	boolean	In user events: whether the user is not registered, using the old way that surfaced the IP publicly
	user_is_temporary	boolean	In user events: whether the user is not registered, using the new temporary account way
	user_is_permanent	boolean	In user events: whether the user is registered
	user_registration_timestamp	string	In user events: registration timestamp of the user.
user_creation_timestamp	string	In user events: Creation timestamp of the user (from logging table)
user_first_edit_timestamp	string	In user events: Timestamp of the first edit of the user
revision	revision_id	bigint	In revision events: id of the revision
	revision_parent_id	bigint	In revision events: id of the parent revision
	revision_minor_edit	boolean	In revision events: whether it is a minor edit or not
	revision_deleted_parts	array<string>	In revision events: Deleted parts of the revision, can contain values text, comment and user
	revision_deleted_parts_are_suppressed	boolean	In revision events: Whether the deleted parts are deleted to admin as well (visible only by stewards)
	revision_text_bytes	bigint	In revision events: number of bytes of revision
	revision_text_bytes_diff	bigint	In revision events: change in bytes relative to parent revision (can be negative).
	revision_text_sha1	string	In revision events: sha1 hash of the revision
	revision_content_model	string	In revision events: content model of revision
	revision_content_format	string	In revision events: content format of revision
	revision_is_deleted_by_page_deletion	boolean	In revision events: whether this revision has been deleted (moved to archive table)
	revision_deleted_by_page_deletion_timestamp	string	In revision events: the timestamp when the revision was deleted
	revision_is_identity_reverted	boolean	In revision events: whether this revision was reverted by another future revision
	revision_first_identity_reverting_revision_id	bigint	In revision events: id of the revision that reverted this revision
	revision_seconds_to_identity_revert	bigint	In revision events: seconds elapsed between revision posting and its revert (if there was one)
	revision_is_identity_revert	boolean	In revision events: whether this revision reverts other revisions
	revision_is_from_before_page_creation	boolean	In revision events: True if the revision timestamp is before the page creation (can happen with restore events)
	revision_tags	array<string>	In revision events: Tags associated to the revision

Code examples

Scala spark examples

Python spark examples

Python Pandas examples

Python Dask examples

Changes and known problems

Date	PhabTask	Snapshot version	Details
2020-01		2019-12	Initial release