Import Wikipedia tables without losing the revision behind the numbers

Description and use

An actor extracts selected prose and ordinary wikitables from Wikipedia articles while preserving the article envelope—title, source URL, revisionId, and license—so each row keeps article context. Caps are maxTables 10, maxRowsPerTable 100, combined runtime cap 10 000. Pricing is $0.002 per documented unit plus a $0.003 start event. Build verified at 0.1.4.

Problem

A spreadsheet copied from a Wikipedia article is hard to audit after the article changes because the importer loses the page revision and cannot distinguish prose, ordinary data tables, and layout elements. The goal is to retain the source article and revision alongside extracted rows so that downstream joins and audits remain traceable.

Outcome

The extractor retains the article envelope—title, source URL, revisionId, and license—with each extracted table, so every imported value has article context. The resulting dataset is easier to maintain because a reviewer can answer where a number came from by including the source and revision.

Workflow

• Choose one through ten English Wikipedia article URLs as input.
• Set includeText to true and includeTables to true; maxTables caps at 10 and maxRowsPerTable caps at 100.
• The extractor selects wikitable elements rather than infoboxes, navigation, or layout tables.
• Retain title, source URL, revisionId, and license link with the extracted tables.
• If flattening nested rows, copy the article identity and table position into each exported row.
• Treat normalized headers as importer metadata, not necessarily stable identifiers across revisions.
• Before accepting a new snapshot, compare its revision identity, table count, and headers with the prior accepted import.
• Inspect added or removed tables before deleting warehouse data.
• Keep a separate record for a missing page and for a capped article.

Evidence

A spreadsheet copied from an encyclopedia article is difficult to audit after the article changes. The values may still look reasonable, but the importer has lost the page revision and the distinction between prose, ordinary data tables and layout elements.

Keep title, source URL, revisionId and the license link with the extracted tables. If you flatten nested rows into a warehouse table, copy the article identity and table position into each exported row.

maxTables can select at most twenty tables, and maxRowsPerTable can select at most two hundred data rows. The runtime also restricts the product of article count, table cap and row cap to ten thousand.

The current FREE-tier result price is $0.002 for the documented unit: One Wikipedia article with all its tables extracted as structured rows. The listing also has a $0.003 start event, charged per GB of Actor memory with a minimum of one event.

The contract for this draft was checked against installed build 0.1.4 (UPcHrUYn8dbSXodzo). The input above is an illustrative schema example, not a newly executed run.