Logged events

These XML dump files contain metadata about events logged by the MediaWiki engine that powers each Wikipedia site. The list of events tracked by the system is long (see below) and corresponds to the information stored in Mediawiki's logging database table.

Some examples of logged events include administrative actions performed by admins and other users with special attributions, like blocking/unblocking other editors, page protection/unprotection, page deletion, page moving, granting/revoking privileges to other users, etc.

As a result, these metadata are quite valuable to study the behaviour of Wikipedia power users, as well as to track special actions on Wikipedia pages.

Standard filename format

These files are named using the following format:

Mandatory elements are shown in {}, while optional elements are shown in []. The meaning of each field is:

• lang: Identifier of the Wikipedia language. The current convention is to prepend the corresponding ISO 639 code for the language to the term wiki, identifying Wikipedia dumps. Dumps from other Wikimedia projects use their own identifier ("wikiquote", "wikibooks", etc.).
• date: The date on which the dump file was produced. For large dump files, this date does not correspond to the date of the last revision included in the file (compression and integrity checks may take some time).
• pages-logging: Identifier of the type of dump file, in this case metadata describing all relevant events logged by MediaWiki on each Wikipedia site.
• num: In large Wikipedia languages with too many pages and edits, producing a single dump file would be impractical. In these cases, the dump is split in different files, usually by page id in ascending order. Thus, we will need to process all these individual files to recover all metadata about pages and revisions in that language.
• xml: Type of data file. Currently, dumps of logged events are only provided in XML format.
• compress: Algorithm used to compress the file. It is customary to use gzip.

File content

Heading elements

The heading elements are identical as for the full history version.

• <mediawiki>: This is the root element. It provides information about the XML namespace and the URL of the schema describing some of the XML elements (v0.6, still work in progress).
• <siteinfo>: Includes general information about this Wikipedia site, with the following subelements:
• <sitename>: Name of this Wikipedia site (in the corresponding language).
• <base>: Base URL for all pages in this Wikipedia site.
• <generator>: Version of the MediaWiki engine that produced this dump.
• <case>: Convention for text case (usually, first letter of each word).
• <namespaces>: A list of the name (localized for that language) and the internal numerical code for each namespace in this MediaWiki site. Codes are important, since they identify the namespace for each <page> element.

Below you can find XML code snippets with examples for each of these elements.

• <mediawiki>
• <siteinfo>
• List of namespaces

<mediawiki xmlns="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10/"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10/
  http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10.xsd" version="0.10" xml:lang="en">

<siteinfo>
    <sitename>Wikipedia</sitename>
    <dbname>enwiki</dbname>
    <base>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page</base>
    <generator>MediaWiki 1.25wmf10</generator>
    <case>first-letter</case>
    <namespaces>
      <namespace key="-2" case="first-letter">Media</namespace>
      <namespace key="-1" case="first-letter">Special</namespace>
      <namespace key="0" case="first-letter" />
      <namespace key="1" case="first-letter">Talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="2" case="first-letter">User</namespace>
      [... rest of namespace definitions ...]
    </namespaces>
  </siteinfo>

Example content

The following code snippet shows a complete excerpt of the content in one of these files:

<mediawiki xmlns="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10/" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10/ 
http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.10.xsd" version="0.10" xml:lang="sco">
  <siteinfo>
    <sitename>Wikipedia</sitename>
    <dbname>scowiki</dbname>
    <base>http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page</base>
    <generator>MediaWiki 1.25wmf24</generator>
    <case>first-letter</case>
    <namespaces>
      <namespace key="-2" case="first-letter">Media</namespace>
      <namespace key="-1" case="first-letter">Special</namespace>
      <namespace key="0" case="first-letter" />
      <namespace key="1" case="first-letter">Talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="2" case="first-letter">User</namespace>
      <namespace key="3" case="first-letter">User talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="4" case="first-letter">Wikipedia</namespace>
      <namespace key="5" case="first-letter">Wikipedia talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="6" case="first-letter">File</namespace>
      <namespace key="7" case="first-letter">File talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="8" case="first-letter">MediaWiki</namespace>
      <namespace key="9" case="first-letter">MediaWiki talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="10" case="first-letter">Template</namespace>
      <namespace key="11" case="first-letter">Template talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="12" case="first-letter">Help</namespace>
      <namespace key="13" case="first-letter">Help talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="14" case="first-letter">Category</namespace>
      <namespace key="15" case="first-letter">Category talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="100" case="first-letter">Portal</namespace>
      <namespace key="101" case="first-letter">Portal talk</namespace>
      <namespace key="828" case="first-letter">Module</namespace>
      <namespace key="829" case="first-letter">Module talk</namespace>
    </namespaces>
  </siteinfo>
  <logitem>
    <id>1</id>
    <timestamp>2005-06-22T12:18:33Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Jdforrester</username>
      <id>6</id>
    </contributor>
    <comment>From [[en:Image:Flag of Scotland Pantone300.png]].</comment>
    <type>upload</type>
    <action>upload</action>
    <logtitle>File:Flag of Scotland Pantone300.png</logtitle>
    <params xml:space="preserve" />
  </logitem>
  <logitem>
    <id>2</id>
    <timestamp>2005-06-22T20:57:46Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Jock</username>
      <id>11</id>
    </contributor>
    <type>upload</type>
    <action>upload</action>
    <logtitle>File:ScotsPairlament.png</logtitle>
    <params xml:space="preserve" />
  </logitem>
  <logitem>
    <id>3</id>
    <timestamp>2005-06-22T21:11:19Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Jock</username>
      <id>11</id>
    </contributor>
    <type>upload</type>
    <action>upload</action>
    <logtitle>File:ScotsPairlament.png</logtitle>
    <params xml:space="preserve" />
  </logitem>
  <logitem>
    <id>4</id>
    <timestamp>2005-06-26T13:01:52Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Colin Angus Mackay</username>
      <id>20</id>
    </contributor>
    <comment>labelled map of scotland</comment>
    <type>upload</type>
    <action>upload</action>
    <logtitle>File:ScotlandLabelled.png</logtitle>
    <params xml:space="preserve" />
  </logitem>