Tutorial: Non-English Wikipedia analysis

Goal

Use Refract to analyze pages on any language edition of Wikipedia. Refract works with any MediaWiki instance — English is just the default. This tutorial uses German Wikipedia (de.wikipedia.org) as an example.

Why non-English wikis matter

Different language editions tell different versions of the same story. A claim that appears in English Wikipedia may be absent, contested, or framed differently in German, French, or Japanese. Refract's --api flag lets you run the same deterministic analysis on any language edition and compare results.

Step 1: Analyze a page on German Wikipedia

refract analyze "COVID-19" --api https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php --depth detailed

Output is identical in structure to English Wikipedia — same 26 event types, same EvidenceEvent schema, same deterministic guarantees. Only the page content differs:

Analysis Results
  Page:    COVID-19
  Events:  247

[2020-03-15T12:00:00Z] sentence_first_seen (rev 123456789→123456790)
  Section: Symptome
  • COVID-19 kann zu Symptomen wie Fieber, Husten und Atemnot führen.

Step 2: Compare across editions

Export both language editions and compare:

refract analyze "COVID-19" \
  --api https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php \
  --depth detailed -c > covid-en.jsonl

refract analyze "COVID-19" \
  --api https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php \
  --depth detailed -c > covid-de.jsonl

Query for differences with DuckDB:

SELECT 'en' AS wiki, count(*) AS events FROM 'covid-en.jsonl'
UNION ALL
SELECT 'de', count(*) FROM 'covid-de.jsonl';

Or use refract diff for structured cross-wiki comparison:

refract diff "COVID-19" \
  --wiki-a https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php \
  --wiki-b https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php \
  --depth detailed

refract diff compares the same topic across wikis and surfaces statistical outliers via z-score detection.

Step 3: Track a claim across language editions

# English
refract claim "COVID-19" --text "originated in Wuhan" \
  --api https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

# German
refract claim "COVID-19" --text "erstmals in Wuhan" \
  --api https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

Compare when each edition first added the claim, whether it was removed, and whether talk page discussion accompanied the change.

Step 4: Forensic depth on non-English pages

All depth levels work identically:

refract analyze "COVID-19" \
  --api https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php \
  --depth forensic -c

Forensic depth enables talk page correlation, edit cluster detection, and sentence modification tracking — the same structural analysis, regardless of language.

Supported language editions

Refract has been tested against:

Language API endpoint Example page
English https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php Earth
German https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php Erde
French https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php Terre
Japanese https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/api.php 地球

Any MediaWiki instance that exposes an api.php endpoint is supported. This includes:

  • All 300+ Wikipedia language editions
  • Fandom wikis (e.g., https://starwars.fandom.com/api.php)
  • Independent MediaWiki installations
  • Private/authenticated wikis (see private wiki tutorial)

Caching across wikis

The cache stores revisions per API endpoint, so analyzing the same page on different wikis doesn't interfere:

refract analyze "Earth" --api https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php -c
refract analyze "Earth" --api https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php -c

Each wiki's data is stored separately. Use --cache-dir to change the cache location.

Next steps

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