juno-labs/simple_wikipedia

Simple English Wikipedia (Markdown)

Recurring weekly snapshot of Simple English Wikipedia (https://simple.wikipedia.org/), which uses shorter sentences and limited vocabulary compared to the main English Wikipedia. This makes it smaller, easier to parse, and better suited for on-device or bandwidth‑constrained assistants while still covering broad general knowledge. Ideal as an offline Wikipedia MCP server backing a household AI assistant.

• Dump date: 2026-03-01
• Source dump: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/simplewiki/20260301/simplewiki-20260301-pages-articles.xml.bz2
• SHA-1: 9c97bad1a3c0862e21b94f3d355a8e700d837c45
• Records: 276302
• Refresh cadence: Weekly on Sundays at 11:00 UTC

Dataset Structure

Columns:

• page_id (int64): Unique page identifier from Wikimedia dump.
• title (string): Article title.
• content (string): Article body converted to markdown with internal and external links preserved.
• content_no_link (string): Same content with markdown links stripped to plain text.
• importance (string): Importance for a household smart speaker assistant (low, medium, high, or unknown when not categorized).
• truncated (bool): true when the source article exceeded 40,000 characters; only the first two paragraphs are parsed and stored in this case; otherwise false.
• error (bool): true when the article could not be parsed (content fields are empty in this case); otherwise false.

Processing

• Downloaded pages-articles XML dump and verified SHA-1.
• Kept only namespace 0 articles, skipped redirects, and dropped titles beginning with “List of”.
• Stripped templates/ref/gallery blocks and file/category links; converted headings, lists, tables, and internal/external links to Markdown with page IDs.
• Stored a SQLite mirror (pages table) alongside the Hugging Face dataset.
• Markdown links point to the target page's numeric ID for fast lookup without a title-to-ID join.

Usage

Load with datasets:

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juno-labs/simple_wikipedia", split="train")
print(ds[0])

SQLite usage (simplewiki.sqlite mirrors the same columns):

sqlite3 simplewiki.sqlite "SELECT page_id, title, substr(content,1,200) || '...' FROM pages LIMIT 5;"

You can also mount it in code:

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect("simplewiki.sqlite")
cur = conn.cursor()
for row in cur.execute("SELECT title, content FROM pages WHERE page_id = ?", (7553,)):
    print(row)

Categorization

Importance labels indicate how useful an article is for day-to-day offline household smart-speaker queries; unknown is used when labeling is disabled or fails.

• Model: openai/gpt-oss-120b
• distribution:
  • low: 68.10%
  • medium: 30.34%
  • high: 1.52%
  • unknown: 0.04%

Prompt template:

You are classifying Simple Wikipedia articles for offline storage on a home voice-assistant used by households in the United States. The smart speaker may be in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, or other common areas.

Goal:
Decide how important it is to store an article offline so the assistant can answer common, everyday user questions using the content of the article.

Guidelines:
- Think about what typical families, parents, kids, and adults might ask a smart speaker at home.
- Consider how often the topic is likely to be asked about and how useful the information is day-to-day.

Importance levels:
- "high": Very common or important topics that many households are likely to ask about regularly.
  - Major holidays, widely-known public figures, basic school topics for kids.
  - Frequently asked geography or time questions (countries, big cities, days, months, seasons).

- "medium": Useful but not essential topics that some households might ask about sometimes.
  - Common hobbies, sports, and entertainment topics.
  - Popular animals, foods, and travel-related information.
  - Well-known historical events or scientific ideas that are not asked about every day.

- "low": Rarely asked or very specialized topics.
  - Obscure historical events, people, or places.
  - Advanced science, math, or technical subjects.
  - Niche cultural topics or very narrow interests.

Some example questions a family member might ask:
- "When is Christmas this year?"
- "What is the tallest mountain in the world?"
- "How old was the oldest dog ever?"
- "Who invented the telephone?"
- "What is the dewey decimal system?"
- "How many tentacles does a squid have?"
- "What are the colors in the rainbow?"
- "When did Einstein die?"
- "What is the population of Tokyo?"

Examples (with reasoning just for demonstration):

1.
Article title: "Christmas"
Short summary: Christmas is a widely celebrated holiday on December 25, often involving gifts and family gatherings.
Explanation (example only): Families frequently ask about dates, traditions, recipes, and activities related to this holiday.
Answer: high

2.
Article title: "Volcano"
Short summary: A volcano is a mountain where hot melted rock (lava) can come out during an eruption.
Explanation (example only): Kids and adults might sometimes ask about volcanoes for school or curiosity, but it is not an everyday need for most households.
Answer: medium

3.
Article title: "Soccer"
Short summary: Soccer is a popular team sport played by kicking a ball into a goal.
Explanation (example only): Sports topics are common, but not every household asks about them regularly. It is useful but not critical.
Answer: medium

4.
Article title: "Battle of Poitiers (1356)"
Short summary: A medieval battle in the Hundred Years' War between England and France.
Explanation (example only): This is a specific historical battle that only a small number of users are likely to ask about.
Answer: low

5.
Article title: "Quark–gluon plasma"
Short summary: A very hot, dense state of matter studied in high-energy physics.
Explanation (example only): This is an advanced scientific topic that almost no household will ask a smart speaker about in daily life.
Answer: low

6.
Article title: "Elephant"
Short summary: Elephants are large mammals that live in Africa and Asia.
Explanation: Very common trivia questions from kids and adults; frequently asked in homes.
Answer: high

7.
Article title: "The Moon"
Short summary: Earth's natural satellite.
Explanation: Very common astronomy trivia; asked often in households.
Answer: high