Project:Analytics/WCD

Introduction

Wikipedia Citations Database is an effort supported by Internet Archive to build a comprehensive, historical database of each citation to appear on Wikipedia.

While methodologies of similar projects have focused on extracting standardized identifiers or easy-to-extract references, this project instead seeks to build a complete database, based on analyzing the structure.

Generations

WCD Generation 1: Wikibase instance on Wikibase Cloud. Importing data was painfully slow, and it was decided Wikibase was not a good format for the data we were trying to store. The dataset produced is lost and was not very interesting or useful.
WCD Generation 2: IARI; Postgres-based, but was extremely difficult to work with. Parts of it are used to support the Internet Archive Reference Explorer.
WCD Generation 3: The latest attempt, using wiki-references-extractor and wiki-references-db (WRDB). WRDB is a core component of the broader WCD project.
- Version 1: https://wikipediacitations.scatter.red
  - Partial build of English Wikipedia
  - Has issues dealing with broken wikitext
- Version 2:
  - Rather than build an entire database upfront, have it be possible to analyze a page URL at a point in time. This will allow us to prove the extraction mechanisms are working without resorting to building an entire database first
  - Be able to tell what part of the article a reference is from (in-line vs. endnote, etc.)
  - JSON representation of template parameters so you don't have to parse them out of the template
  - Use LLM to parse the article in general. Maybe have an option to select between classical parsing and LLM-based extraction.
    - Use basic mwparserfromhell extraction as first step. If a user comes across an entry and it looks broken, offer option to re-generate report with AI. User can then accept alternative.
  - In data model, associate references with revision id; then, associate revision IDs with timestamps in another table

2025-10-16 WRDB migration

WRDB is the Postgres database of citation strings at the core of the WCD effort.

Migration away from station1001 is underway. This started sooner but I am documenting my progress as of today.

Successfully transferred between station1001 and the new VM, wrdb-gen3v1, and just now, verified via md5sum.

jh@wrdb-gen3v1:/bulk/downloads$ md5sum 2024-10-wrdb.sql.gz
1819ec7f76887e854903550ce1d30ac6  2024-10-wrdb.sql.gz

jh@station1001:/opt/librarybase/wikibase$ md5sum ~/2024-10-wrdb.sql.gz
1819ec7f76887e854903550ce1d30ac6  /home/jh/2024-10-wrdb.sql.gz

Downloading the English Wikipedia dump to my home workstation is going painfully slowly. I do not know why the download is only ~1.5MB/s. If I want to do a rebuild, my Plan B may be to instead set up a wrdb-gen3v2 on station1001 (rebuilt with Proxmox) and dedicate it to the rebuild. If I have a pre-process step that turns the dumps into a neat bundle of diffs, it should not require as much RAM to process (since I will no longer have to deal with XML in memory). I still want to do the WRDB rebuild on my workstation, but pre-processing on station1001 may give me a smaller file I can download. Once the pre-process is done I should have enough resources for a secondary copy of WDQS.

In the meantime, now that I have a database dump of WRDB on the wrdb-gen3v1 virtual machine, the next steps are:

Re-import into Postgres
Re-start web service
Change proxy to point to new web service
Create process for on-demand update:
1. User requests data for a certain article. There is a notice saying to check back later if the data is not up to date.
2. Article is added to the update queue
3. Process works through the update queue, getting all revisions since the most recent one in the database
4. Each revision has references extracted and the database is updated
5. To prevent excessive updates, if an article is already in the queue, it can't be re-added to the queue. And if an article was refreshed in the last hour, it is sent to the back of the queue.
6. Eventually add a low-priority queue that cycles through English Wikipedia in alphabetical order so that there is always passive updating.

On-demand updates for particular articles should tide me over until I have the opportunity to do a full rebuild.

Note: I can't take down the current instance on station1001 until the new one is set up. Once the new one is set up, that's the final service before I can begin setting up Proxmox on station1001.