[fox91]

Why would I need the dump in JSON? XML is for sure uglier but at least there are efficient SAX parsers.

[dk8996]

I would like to know this as well. What is gained by using this tool... converting to JSON?

[tcdent]

JSON is cool and hip.

More seriously, it has been gaining popularity because of it's direct relationship to built-in structures in most programming languages.

For example: XML doesn't have a concept of arrays, but accomplishes storing collections in it's own special way. It's up to the parser to determine how this should be referenced and interacted-with, while with JSON there's no question: it's an array.

[sillysaurus2]

For example, now I know for a fact I can easily manipulate Wikipedia's data dump using Python thanks to this JSON change.

    import json

    js = json.loads(wikidump)

That's it. The only reason it's so simple is thanks to this JSON conversion.

XML? No clue how to manipulate it properly. I could figure it out of course, but now I don't have to. JSON + Python just works™.

[diegolo]

yes, and also it makes easy to manipulate the dump using Hadoop, and retrieving some values for all the article using jq http://stedolan.github.io/jq/, could you do the same with XML? Btw You can find a little sample of the dump here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4663256/tmp/json-wikiped...