This is a mirror repo for the script by Giuseppe Attardi, and contains history before the official repo started.

Please refer to the official repo if there any issues: https://github.com/attardi/wikiextractor

Wikipedia Extractor

Introduction

The project uses the Italian Wikipedia as source of documents for several purposes: as training data and as source of data to be annotated.

The Wikipedia maintainers provide, each month, an XML dump of all documents in the database: it consists of a single XML file containing the whole encyclopedia, that can be used for various kinds of analysis, such as statistics, service lists, etc.

Wikipedia dumps are available from Wikipedia database download.

The Wikipedia extractor tool generates plain text from a Wikipedia database dump, discarding any other information or annotation present in Wikipedia pages, such as images, tables, references and lists.

Each document in the dump of the encyclopedia is representend as a single XML element, encoded as illustrated in the following example from the document titled Armonium:

 <page>
 <title>Armonium</title>
 <id>2</id>
 <timestamp>2008-06-22T21:48:55Z</timestamp>
 <username>Nemo bis</username>
 <comment>italiano</comment>
 <text xml:space="preserve">thumb|right|300 px

 L'armonium' (in francese, harmonium) è uno
  strumento musicale azionato con una tastiera, detta
 manuale. Sono stati costruiti anche alcuni armonium con due manuali.

 ==Armonium occidentale==
 Come l'organo, l'armonium è utilizzato tipicamente in
 chiesa, per l'esecuzione di musica sacra, ed è
 fornito di pochi registri, quando addirittura in certi casi non ne possiede
 nemmeno uno: il suo timbro è molto meno ricco di quello
 organistico e così pure la sua estensione.

 ...

 ==Armonium indiano==
 Template:S sezione

 == Voci correlate ==
 *Musica
 *Generi musicali</text>

For this document the Wikipedia extractor produces the following plain text:

<doc id="2" url="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armonium">
Armonium.
L'armonium (in francese, “harmonium”) è uno strumento musicale azionato con
una tastiera, detta manuale. Sono stati costruiti anche alcuni armonium con
due manuali.

Armonium occidentale.
Come l'organo, l'armonium è utilizzato tipicamente in chiesa, per l'esecuzione
di musica sacra, ed è fornito di pochi registri, quando addirittura in certi
casi non ne possiede nemmeno uno: il suo timbro è molto meno ricco di quello
organistico e così pure la sua estensione.
...
</doc>

The extraction tool is written in Python and requires no additional library. it aims to achieve high accuracy in extraction task.

Wikipedia articles are written in the MediaWiki Markup Language, which provides a simple notation for formatting text (bolds, italics, underlines, images, tables, etc.). It is also posible to insert HTML markup in the documents. Wiki and HTML tags are often misused (unclosed tags, wrong attributes, etc.), therefore the extractor deploys several heuristics in order to circumvent such problems. A currently missing feature for the extractor is template expansion.

Description

WikiExtractor.py is a Python script that extracts and cleans text from a Wikipedia database dump. The output is stored in a number of files of similar size in a given directory. Each file contains several documents in the document format.

Usage:

 WikiExtractor.py [options]

Options:

 -c, --compress        : compress output files using bzip
 -b, --bytes= n[KM]    : put specified bytes per output file (default 500K)
 -B, --base= URL       : base URL for the Wikipedia pages
 -o, --output= dir     : place output files in specified directory (default
                         current)
 -l, --link            : preserve links
 --help                : display this help and exit

Example of Use

The following commands illustrate how to apply the script to a Wikipedia dump:

> wget http://download.wikimedia.org/itwiki/latest/itwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
> bzcat itwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | WikiExtractor.py -cb 250K -o extracted -

In order to combine the whole extracted text into a single file one can issue:

> find extracted -name '*bz2' -exec bunzip2 -c {} \; > text.xml
> rm -rf extracted

Related Work

• WikiPrep A Perl tool for preprocessing Wikipedia XML dumps.
• Extracting Text from Wikipedia Another Python tool for text extracting from Wikipedia XML dumps.
• Alternative Parsers A list of links, descriptions, and status reports of the various alternative MediaWiki parsers.