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license: cc-by-sa-3.0
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# French Wikipedia Dataset

## Overview

This dataset is a curated collection of approximately 1.1 million French Wikipedia articles, scraped directly from the [official French Wikipedia site](https://fr.wikipedia.org/) on September 24, 2023. It aims to address issues with existing Wikipedia datasets, such as poorly parsed text missing essential information like dates and locations.

## Format

- **Type**: Text
- **File Extension**: `.txt`

## Structure

The dataset is divided into the following splits:

- `train.txt`: 90%
- `test.txt` : 5%
- `valid.txt`: 5%

Each article in the dataset exceeds 1200 characters in length.

## Data Cleaning and Preprocessing

The following elements have been excluded from the dataset:

- H1 - H4 Headings
- Lists
- Tables
- Sources and References

The text has been standardized for consistent formatting and line length. Additionally, the dataset has been filtered using the `langid` library to include only text in French. Some quotations or short terms in other languages, including non-Latin languages, may still be present.

## Exploring the Dataset

You can use the `explore_dataset.py` script to explore the dataset by randomly displaying a certain number of lines from it. The script creates and saves an index based on the line breaks, enabling faster data retrieval and display.

## Additional Information

This dataset is a subset of a larger 10GB French dataset, which also contains several thousand books and theses in French, as well as several hundred thousand Francophone news articles.