Database

• Database file — use the Browse button to specify where on your machine the database dump (XML format, XML file) you have downloaded. (likely from here)
  • The following are automatically read from the header of the XML file specified.
    • Site name — Example: "Wikipedia".
    • Base — Homepage of the site. Example: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page".
    • Generator — Software version that created the dump file. Example: "MediaWiki 1.47.0-wmf.2 (51aa8af)".
    • Case — Casing configuration of site. Example "first-letter".

Namespaces

Select the namespaces you want to search within. If none are selected, the search will include all available namespaces. Please note that your dump file might not contain data for every namespace available on your wiki.

Title matching

• Title does contain — Restrict the search to titles containing the text, or matching the text if the Regex option is used.
• Title does not contain — Restrict the search to titles NOT containing the text, or NOT matching the text if the Regex option is used.
• Regex — AWB Regex help
• Case sensitive — Whether the text/matching pattern should be case sensitive.

Revision

Text

Searching

Restriction

Allows for pages with edit restrictions (semi-protected, fully protected etc.) to be searched for.

Help

Some URL links to relevant dump help pages.

Performance

The speed of the database scanner mainly depends on two factors of the system it's run on:

1. CPU single-threaded performance
2. hard disk read speed.

Example performance: Intel Core i5 520M mobile CPU: maximum CPU usage and ~30 MB/s disk sequential read

So, with a reasonable 2010-era or later CPU, AWB will read the database XML dump file at around 30 MB/s and be CPU limited. Therefore, if reading the database file from a networked storage area, database scan performance will be reduced if the network transfer speed is below this speed. When reading the database XML dump file from a local disk, modern mechanical hard disks can normally provide sequential read speeds well above 30 MB/s, therefore the database scan speed will be CPU-limited.

The database scanner is multi-threaded: the database scanner uses the main thread to read the database XML file from disk, and additional thread(s) to search the articles based on the user's search criteria, total threads equalling the number of CPU cores (e.g. if quad core CPU without hyperthreading then 1 main and 3 secondary threads). The main thread will pause XML reading and contribute to article searching if the secondary threads get too far behind. This happens if searching the article based on the search criteria is slower than reading the article from the XML file; typically this is the case. For the example of the Core i5 520M this does occur, database scanner performance is limited to how fast all the threads can search the articles, so overall performance is limited to the multi-threaded performance of the CPU.

A CPU with more cores, and/or better performance from each core would improve database scanner performance.

Convert

• Add headings every — adds a heading every x lines
• Alphabetised headings —
• # — makes a list with # before each page name, if placed on a wiki page, this will number the lines
• * — makes a list with ** before each page name, if placed on a wiki page, this will bullet point the lines
• A B C... headings — adds headings == heading == for page names beginning with that letter
• Make — makes the list
• Copy — copies the list to the users clipboard for copying and pasting into another document
• Save — saves the list as a text document
• Clear — removes all pages from the page list