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README.md

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 # wikiextractor
-A tool for extracting plain text from Wikipedia dumps
+[WikiExtractor.py](http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Wikipedia_Extractor) is a Python script that extracts and cleans text from a [Wikipedia database dump](http://download.wikimedia.org/).
+
+The tool is written in Python and requires no additional library.
+
+The current beta version of WikiExtrctor.py is capable of performing template expansion to some extent.
+
+## Usage
+The script is invoked with a Wikipedia dump file as an argument.
+The output is stored in a number of files of similar size in a chosen directory.
+Each file will contains several documents in this [document format](http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Document_Format).
+
+This is a beta version that performs template expansion by preprocesssng the whole dump and
+extracting template definitions.
+
+    Usage:
+     WikiExtractor.py [options] xml-dump-file
+      
+    optional arguments:
+      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
+      -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
+                            output directory
+      -b n[KM], --bytes n[KM]
+                        put specified bytes per output file (default is 1M)
+      -B BASE, --base BASE  base URL for the Wikipedia pages
+      -c, --compress        compress output files using bzip
+      -l, --links           preserve links
+      -ns ns1,ns2, --namespaces ns1,ns2
+                            accepted namespaces
+      -q, --quiet           suppress reporting progress info
+      -s, --sections        preserve sections
+      -a, --article         analyze a file containing a single article
+      --templates TEMPLATES
+                            use or create file containing templates
+      -v, --version         print program version
+
+Saving templates to a file will speed up performing extraction the next time, assuming template definitions have not changed.
+