Professor Brian Keegan
Department of Information Science, CU Boulder
This notebook is copyright and made available under the Apache License v2.0 license.
This is the first of five lab notebooks that will explore how to do some introductory data extraction and analysis from Wikipedia data. This lab will use a combination of MySQL and Python to retrieve the revision histories for a selection of articles. You do not need to be fluent in either to complete the lab, but there are many options for extending the analyses we do here by using more advanced queries and scripting methods.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation for the PAWS system and related Wikitech infrastructure that this workbook runs within. Yuvi Panda, Aaron Halfaker, Jonathan Morgan, and Dario Taraborelli have all provided crucial support and feedback.
a = 1
b = 2
a+b
list(range(0,5))
your_name = 'Brian Keegan'
print("Hello, {0}".format(your_name))
Load up all the libraries we'll need to connect to the database, retrieve information for analysis, and visualizing results.
# Makes the plots appear within the notebook
%matplotlib inline
# Two fundamental packages for doing data manipulation
import numpy as np # http://www.numpy.org/
import pandas as pd # http://pandas.pydata.org/
# Two related packages for plotting data
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # http://matplotlib.org/
import seaborn as sb # https://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/
# Two packages for accessing the MySQL server
import pymysql # http://pymysql.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
import os # https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/os.html
# Setup the code environment to use plots with a white background and DataFrames show more columns and rows
sb.set_style('whitegrid')
pd.options.display.max_columns = 100
pd.options.display.max_rows = 110
Retrieve the host name, username, and (encrypted) password associated with your account so you can login to the database.
host, user, password = os.environ['MYSQL_HOST'], os.environ['MYSQL_USERNAME'], os.environ['MYSQL_PASSWORD']
Connect to the system using the creditials from above, then select the database for the English Wikipedia.
conn = pymysql.connect(host=host,user=user,password=password,database='enwiki_p',connect_timeout=3600)
conn.cursor().execute('use enwiki_p');
pd.read_sql_query('show tables',conn)
s = """
SELECT
*
FROM
wikilove_log
LIMIT
5
"""
pd.read_sql_query(s,conn)
Article page titles need to be separated by underscores "_" rather than spaces. It's easy to replace spaces with underscores using the replace
method called on the string.
page_title = 'Mitt Romney'.replace(' ','_')
page_title
Write a function get_page_revisions
that takes the name of a Wikipedia page and its namespace and use the database connection to return a pandas DataFrame containing all the revisions for the article. Some of the fields inside needs to be cleaned up by converting to other data types to help with analysis in later steps.
def get_page_revisions(page_title,namespace,conn):
""" Takes a page title and returns its revision history.
page_title = a string for the page title to get its revisions
namespace = an int to get the revisions from a specific namespace
conn = a database connection
Returns:
A pandas DataFrame containing all the article revisions and page information
"""
# In case you pass a page title with spaces in it, replace the spaces with underscores
page_title = page_title.replace(' ','_')
# The MySQL query string used to retrieve the data. By line, it is
## selecting all columns
## from the "revisions" table
## joining the "page" table on it
## using the page_id and rev_page columns as keys
## limiting the results to entries that occur in the namespace and pagetitle
## and ordering the results by the timestamp
s = """
SELECT
*
FROM
revision
JOIN
page ON page.page_id = revision.rev_page
WHERE
page.page_namespace = {1} AND page.page_title = '{0}'
ORDER BY
revision.rev_timestamp ASC
""".format(page_title,namespace)
# Use the connection to run the query and return the results as a DataFrame
_df = pd.read_sql_query(s,conn)
# Some of the results have a "bytestring" format
byte_columns = ['rev_comment','rev_user_text','rev_timestamp','rev_sha1','page_content_model',
'page_title','page_restrictions','page_touched','page_links_updated']
# For each column, convert it from bytestring to a utf8 string
for col in byte_columns:
_df[col] = _df[col].str.decode('utf8')
# Several of the columns are timestamps. Convert to datetimes
_df['rev_timestamp'] = _df['rev_timestamp'].apply(lambda x:pd.datetime.strptime(x,'%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
_df['page_touched'] = _df['page_touched'].apply(lambda x:pd.datetime.strptime(x,'%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
_df['page_links_updated'] = _df['page_links_updated'].apply(lambda x:pd.datetime.strptime(x,'%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
# Return the data
return _df
Use the function to get the revisions for a single article and use the .head()
method to inspect the first 5 rows in the DataFrame.
rev_df = get_page_revisions('Mitt Romney',0,conn)
rev_df.head()
Count the total number of revisions in the article.
len(rev_df)
Count the total number of unique users contributing to the article.
len(rev_df['rev_user_text'].unique())
When was the first revision made to the article?
rev_df['rev_timestamp'].min()
When was the most recent revision made to the article?
rev_df['rev_timestamp'].max()
How has the size of the article changed over time?
ax = rev_df['rev_len'].plot()
ax.set_xlabel('Revisions')
ax.set_ylabel('Article size (bytes)')
Who made the largest change to the article?
# Use the idxmax() method to return the index value for the largest value in the series
loc_max_revision = rev_df['rev_len'].idxmax()
# Show the values of a single row
rev_df.ix[loc_max_revision]
Go inspect what this largest revision was. Actually this specific example is extremely NSFW.
rev_id = rev_df.ix[loc_max_revision,'rev_id']
print('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid={0}'.format(rev_id))
Muliple revisions can be made in a single day. We want to be able to count the number of revisions per day and how the article's length has changed over time.
# For each timestamp extract only its date (ignoring the time of day)
# and save as a new column "rev_date"
rev_df['rev_date'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp'].apply(lambda x:x.date())
# Compare the full "rev_timestamp" to the new "rev_date"
rev_df[['rev_timestamp','rev_date']].head()
What dates had the most revisions in a single day? A simple way of doing this is to count the number of times each "rev_date" occurs in the data with the value_counts
method. Let's look at the top 10, 5 of which are in October 2012 in the weeks before the Election Day.
rev_df['rev_date'].value_counts().head(10)
We can use the groupby functionality to create "baby" DataFrames having all the same particular value. For example, we can group by the date and each of the baby DataFrames would be all the revisions that occurred on that date. Store the groupby in the "rev_gb_date" object for subsequent steps.
Inspect a single baby DataFrame by passing the key (the date values we grouped on) to the get_group
method and look at the first 5 entries.
rev_gb_date = rev_df.groupby(['rev_date'])
_date = pd.Timestamp('2012-10-07').date()
rev_gb_date.get_group(_date).head(5)
We can also use aggregate functionality to perform computations efficiently across all the baby DataFrames.
daily_revs = rev_gb_date.agg({'rev_id':pd.Series.nunique})
daily_revs.head()
Reindex the axis to make it continuous over the date range.
# Compute the first and last days revisions were observed
_min, _max = daily_revs.index.min(), daily_revs.index.max()
# Create a new index that is continuous over the whoel date range
_ix = pd.date_range(_min,_max)
# Reindex the daily revisions over the continuous date range filling in the blanks with 0s
daily_revs_reindexed = daily_revs.reindex(_ix).fillna(0)
daily_revs_reindexed.head()
What was the most active day of editing?
daily_revs_reindexed['rev_id'].sort_values(ascending=False).head(5)
Plot the number of revisions by day.
ax = daily_revs_reindexed['rev_id'].plot(lw=.5)
# Label the axes
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Revisions')
This is pretty noisy. We can clean it up by applying a rolling mean over a 60-day window.
smoothed_s = daily_revs_reindexed['rev_id'].rolling(60).mean()
ax = smoothed_s.plot(lw=3)
# Label the axes
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Revisions')
Plot the cumulative sum of the number of revisions over time using the cumsum
method.
ax = daily_revs_reindexed['rev_id'].cumsum().plot(lw=2)
# Label the axes
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Cumulative Revisions')
Using the same "rev_gb_date" object, aggregate each of the baby DataFrames and compute the median article size ("rev_len"). Reindex again to make a continuous time axis.
daily_length = rev_gb_date.agg({'rev_len':np.median})
# Reindex
daily_length_reindexed = daily_length.reindex(_ix).fillna(method='ffill')
daily_length_reindexed.head()
Plot the reindexed series, making the y-axis be on a log scale to pick up detail in the early days when the article was orders of magnitude smaller.
ax = daily_length_reindexed['rev_len'].plot(lw=2,logy=True)
# Label the axes
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Article size (bytes)')
The "rev_len" only records the length of the revision at that point in time. By taking the difference with the previous observation, we can compute how much net content the user added or removed from the previous revision. Using the diff
method on the "rev_len" series, we store the resulting differences as "rev_len_diff".
Compare the first five elements of the two series to verify it's worked as intended.
# Compute the diff and store as a new series
rev_df['rev_len_diff'] = rev_df['rev_len'].diff()
# Verify the differences are accurate
rev_df[['rev_len','rev_len_diff']].head()
Do some more cleanup of the diffs. In particular, when a revision is deleted (which is rare) the "rev_len" value is null, which makes the diff null as well. Make the first revision's "rev_len_diff" equal to the size of the article and then ffill the other nan values.
# Set the revision lengths for the null rows to be the previous value
rev_df['rev_len'] = rev_df['rev_len'].fillna(method='ffill')
# Compute the diffs again
rev_df['rev_len_diff'] = rev_df['rev_len'].diff()
# Set the value for the first rev_len_diff to be the size of the rev_len
rev_df.loc[0,'rev_len_diff'] = rev_df.loc[0,'rev_len']
# Verify the differences are accurate
rev_df[['rev_len','rev_len_diff']].head()
Similarly, the "rev_timestamp" series only records the time when the revision occurred. By taking the difference with the previous revision, we can compute how much time has elapsed since the last edit. Using the diff
method again on the "rev_timestamp" series, we store the resulting differences as "ref_timestamp_diff".
The resulting values are Timedeltas which we convert back to number of day floats by dividing by np.timedelta64
.
Compare the first five elements of the two series to verify it's worked as intended.
# Compute the diff and store as a new series
rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp'].diff()
# Convert the values of the new series to floats by dividing by 1 day time delta.
rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'].apply(lambda x:x/np.timedelta64(1,'D'))
# Verify the differences are accurate.
rev_df[['rev_timestamp','rev_timestamp_diff']].head()
Because we added new series to the "rev_df" we need to re-run the groupby to update it. We can also combine all the different aggregate functions we did before into one step by defining an "agg_dict" that applies an aggregation function over the values in a specific column. This will return a DataFrame with only a subset of columns with the aggregated values we specified.
# Groupby again
rev_gb_date = rev_df.groupby(['rev_date'])
# Define an aggregation mapping of functions to columns names
agg_dict_date = {'rev_id':pd.Series.nunique,
'rev_len':np.median,
'rev_len_diff':np.median,
'rev_timestamp_diff':np.mean
}
# Execiute the aggregation functions on the groupby object
rev_agg_date = rev_gb_date.agg(agg_dict_date)
# Reindex to continuous dates
rev_agg_date = rev_agg_date.reindex(_ix)
# Fill in the resulting values of the reindexed and aggregated "rev_len" from the last value
rev_agg_date[['rev_len']] = rev_agg_date[['rev_len']].fillna(method='ffill')
# Fill in the resulting values of the reindexed and aggregated other series as 0s.
rev_agg_date[['rev_id','rev_len_diff']] = rev_agg_date[['rev_id','rev_len_diff']].fillna(0)
#rev_agg_date[['rev_id','rev_len_diff','rev_timestamp_diff']] = rev_agg_date[['rev_id','rev_len_diff','rev_timestamp_diff']].fillna(0)
# Show the first 10 values to verify it's worked as intended
rev_agg_date.tail(10)
Plot the changes in the average time since the last revision by day.
_s = rev_agg_date['rev_timestamp_diff']
ax = _s.plot(logy=True)
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Average time since last edit (Days)')
That's pretty noisy. We can apply the rolling
method over a 60-day window and get the mean to smooth out some of the noise.
_s = rev_agg_date['rev_timestamp_diff'].fillna(0).rolling(60).mean()
ax = _s.plot()
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Average time since last edit (Days)')
Similarly, what was the median size of a change to the article over time?
_s = rev_agg_date['rev_len_diff']
ax = _s.plot(lw=.5)
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Median size of revision')
ax.set_yscale('symlog')
Again, pretty noisy. We can cleanup with a rolling mean over a 60-day window.
_s = rev_agg_date['rev_len_diff'].rolling(60).mean()
ax = _s.plot()
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Median size of revision')
Which editors made the most contributions to the article?
top_users = rev_df['rev_user_text'].value_counts()
top_users.head(10)
This extremely skewed distribution of activity is characteristic of many online participation patterns: the "long tail" where less than 20% of users are responsible for more than 20% of contributions.
rev_count_occurrences = top_users.value_counts().reset_index()
rev_count_occurrences = rev_count_occurrences.rename(columns={'index':'Revision count','rev_user_text':'Occurrences'})
rev_count_occurrences.head()
Plot the resulting distribution on log-log axes to see the shape of the long-tail distribution.
rev_count_occurrences.plot(x='Revision count',y='Occurrences',kind='scatter',logy=True,logx=True,s=50)
We can also use the groupby-aggregate framework to group all the revisions together by the users who made them, rather than grouping revisions by the date as we did before.
rev_gb_user = rev_df.groupby(['rev_user_text'])
Look at a baby DataFrame within the groupby for a single user. These are all the revisions made by this user to this article.
rev_gb_user.get_group('Eustress').head()
As before we can aggregate all the information in these baby DFs into a user-level dataframe that summarizes different attributes.
# Define the aggregation function mappings to variables.
# We can apply multiple functions to the same column/series by nesting a second dictionary within
agg_dict_user = {'rev_id':{'revs_made':pd.Series.nunique},
'rev_timestamp':{'first_rev':np.min,'last_rev':np.max},
'rev_len_diff':{'rev_len_min':np.min,'rev_len_max':np.max,
'rev_len_med':np.median,'rev_len_sum':np.sum},
'rev_timestamp_diff':{'rev_ts_min':np.min,'rev_ts_max':np.max,
'rev_ts_avg':np.mean}
}
# Perform the aggregation
rev_agg_user = rev_gb_user.agg(agg_dict_user)
# Returns a multi-index column, simplify by dropping the top level
rev_agg_user.columns = rev_agg_user.columns.droplevel(0)
# Sort by number of revisions, and look at the first 5 rows
rev_agg_user.sort_values('revs_made',ascending=False).head()
Define some additional user-level statistics based on this aggregated data.
# Compute tenure as difference between last and first revision, convert back to 1-day floats by dividing by timedelta64
rev_agg_user['tenure'] = (rev_agg_user['last_rev'] - rev_agg_user['first_rev'])/np.timedelta64(1,'D')
# Round values up to whole integers
rev_agg_user['tenure'] = rev_agg_user['tenure'].apply(np.ceil)
# Look at the longest-tenure editors
rev_agg_user['tenure'].sort_values(ascending=False).head()
ax = rev_agg_user['tenure'].plot('hist',logy=True,bins=25)
ax.set_xlabel('Tenure (Days)')
ax.set_ylabel('Number of editors')
logspace_bins = np.logspace(start=0, stop=4, num=25)
ax = rev_agg_user['tenure'].plot('hist',logy=True,logx=True,bins=logspace_bins)
ax.set_xlabel('Tenure (Days)')
ax.set_ylabel('Number of editors')
g = sb.lmplot(x='tenure',y='revs_made',data=rev_agg_user.query('tenure > 1'),aspect=1.5)
ax = g.axes[0][0]
ax.set_xlim((0,1e4))
ax.set_ylim((0,1e4))
ax.set_xscale('symlog')
ax.set_yscale('symlog')
Define a function get_user_info
that takes a revision DataFrame containing a "rev_user" column/series. For all the users in the revision history, get their user information like regristration date and current edit count.
def get_user_info(rev_df,conn):
if 'rev_user' in rev_df.columns:
# Get all the user IDs from the revision DF
_ids = rev_df['rev_user'].unique().tolist()
# Remove the 0s and convert the rest to strings
_ids = [str(i) for i in _ids if i != 0]
# Join the list of strings into a big comma-separated string
user_string = ', '.join(_ids)
# Write the query
## Select specific columns
## from the user table
## where the user_ids are among the users revising the article
s = """
SELECT
user_id, user_name, user_registration, user_editcount
FROM
user
WHERE
user_id IN ({0})
ORDER BY
user_editcount DESC
""".format(user_string)
# Run the query
_df = pd.read_sql_query(s,conn)
# Some of the results have a "bytestring" format
byte_columns = ['user_name','user_registration']
# For each column, convert it from bytestring to a utf8 string
for col in byte_columns:
_df[col] = _df[col].str.decode('utf8')
# Some of the values are missing, recode them as Jan 1, 2000
_df['user_registration'] = _df['user_registration'].replace({None:'20000101000000'})
# Convert timestamps to datetimes
_df['user_registration'] = _df['user_registration'].apply(lambda x:pd.datetime.strptime(x,'%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
# Return the results
return _df
Run the get_user_info
function on the "rev_df" DataFrame to get information about each of the users who contributed to the article.
# Refresh the database connection since too much time has passed since the last query
conn.ping()
conn.cursor().execute('use enwiki_p');
# Get the user information.
rev_user_info_df = get_user_info(rev_df,conn)
rev_user_info_df.head()
Merge the "rev_agg_user" and the "rev_user_info_df" DataFrames together by joining on the user name.
# Merge the two DataFrames together using the index of "reg_agg_user"
# and the "user_name" field from rev_user_info_df, joining on the left values which should be more inclusive
merged_rev_agg_user = pd.merge(rev_agg_user,rev_user_info_df,left_index=True,right_on='user_name',how='left')
# Check if the two DataFrames have the same number of users, if False then there will be NaNs
print(len(rev_agg_user) == len(rev_user_info_df))
# Show the first five rows
merged_rev_agg_user.head()
What fraction of the user's toital edits are devoted to this single article?
merged_rev_agg_user['rev_fraction'] = merged_rev_agg_user['revs_made']/merged_rev_agg_user['user_editcount']
# Plot the distribution. Use log-bins since the data is so skewed
logspace_bins = np.logspace(start=-7, stop=0, num=25)
ax = merged_rev_agg_user['rev_fraction'].plot('hist',logy=False,logx=True,bins=logspace_bins)
ax.set_xlabel('Fraction of total edits')
ax.set_ylabel('Count')
How long after a user's account registration did they make their first edit to this article?
merged_rev_agg_user['first_rev_account_age'] = merged_rev_agg_user['first_rev'] - merged_rev_agg_user['user_registration']
merged_rev_agg_user['first_rev_account_age'] = merged_rev_agg_user['first_rev_account_age']/np.timedelta64(1,'D')
# Plot the distribution. Use log-bins since the data is so skewed
logspace_bins = np.logspace(start=-1, stop=4, num=25)
ax = merged_rev_agg_user['first_rev_account_age'].plot('hist',logy=False,logx=True,bins=logspace_bins)
ax.set_xlabel('Account age at first article revision')
ax.set_ylabel('Count')
Do users editing the article earlier in their career end up contributing more to the article?
g = sb.lmplot(x='first_rev_account_age',y='revs_made',data=merged_rev_agg_user.query('tenure > 1'),aspect=1.5)
ax = g.axes[0][0]
ax.set_xlim((0,1e4))
ax.set_ylim((0,1e4))
ax.set_xscale('symlog')
ax.set_yscale('symlog')
ax.set_xlabel('Account age at first article revision')
ax.set_ylabel('Total article revisions')
# Refresh the database connection since too much time has passed since the last query
conn.ping()
conn.cursor().execute('use enwiki_p');
# Get the second set of revisions
rev2_df = get_page_revisions('John McCain',0,conn)
Do the data cleanup and feature engineering for later steps. Define a function to do all the feature engineering steps with one call.
def data_cleanup(rev_df):
# Compute the rev_date from the timestamps
rev_df['rev_date'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp'].apply(lambda x:x.date())
# Set the revision lengths for the null rows to be the previous value
rev_df['rev_len'] = rev_df['rev_len'].fillna(method='ffill')
# Compute the diffs and store as a new series
rev_df['rev_len_diff'] = rev_df['rev_len'].diff()
# Set the value for the first rev_len_diff to be the size of the rev_len
rev_df.loc[0,'rev_len_diff'] = rev_df.loc[0,'rev_len']
# Compute the diffs and store as a new series
rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp'].diff()
# Convert the values of the new series to floats by dividing by 1 day time delta.
rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'] = rev_df['rev_timestamp_diff'].apply(lambda x:x/np.timedelta64(1,'D'))
return rev_df
Run the cleanup on rev2_df
and confirm it has all the variables (columns) we need.
rev2_df = data_cleanup(rev2_df)
rev2_df.head()
Group by the "rev_date", compute the daily_revs, re-index to make the time continuous.
rev2_gb_date = rev2_df.groupby(['rev_date'])
daily_revs2 = rev2_gb_date.agg({'rev_id':pd.Series.nunique})
# Compute the first and last days revisions were observed
_min, _max = daily_revs2.index.min(), daily_revs2.index.max()
# Create a new index that is continuous over the whoel date range
_ix = pd.date_range(_min,_max)
# Reindex the daily revisions over the continuous date range filling in the blanks with 0s
daily_revs2_reindexed = daily_revs2.reindex(_ix).fillna(0)
Combine both of the daily_revs series into a DataFrame by merging, renaming the columns, and filling the blank values with 0s.
daily_revs_compared_df = pd.merge(daily_revs_reindexed,daily_revs2_reindexed,
how='outer',left_index=True,right_index=True)
# The left DF was Mitt Romney and the right DF was John McCain. Rename to that effect
daily_revs_compared_df = daily_revs_compared_df.rename(columns={'rev_id_x':'Mitt Romney','rev_id_y':'John McCain'})
# Fill the null values with 0s
daily_revs_compared_df.fillna(0,inplace=True)
# Look at the first 5 rows
daily_revs_compared_df.head()
Plot the comparisong of both results in a single chart. Use a rolling average of 60 days to smooth out noise.
ax = daily_revs_compared_df.rolling(60).mean().plot(lw=3)
# Label the axes
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Revisions')
Zoom in on the 2008 election season.
# Define two rough dates marking the start and stop of the election season
_min = pd.Timestamp('2007-01-01').date()
_max = pd.Timestamp('2009-01-01').date()
# Create a subset_df based on the 2-year window of dates
subset_df = daily_revs_compared_df.ix[_min:_max]
# Use a window of 28 days to compute the rolling average instead
ax = subset_df.rolling(28).mean().plot(lw=3)
# Draw a vertical lines for major campaign dates
ax.axvline(pd.Timestamp('2008-02-05').date(),c='black',lw=1,ls='--') # Super Tuesday in black
ax.axvline(pd.Timestamp('2008-09-04').date(),c='orange',lw=1,ls='--') # RNC in orange
ax.axvline(pd.Timestamp('2008-11-04').date(),c='red',lw=1,ls='--') # Election day in red
ax.set_xlabel('Date')
ax.set_ylabel('Revisions')