README.md

metadata

license: cc-by-sa-4.0
language:
  - en
pretty_name: English Wikivoyage Retrieval 2026-05
task_categories:
  - sentence-similarity
  - feature-extraction
  - question-answering
tags:
  - wikivoyage
  - wikimedia
  - retrieval
  - vector-search
  - lancedb
  - faiss
  - sqlite
  - travel
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
configs:
  - config_name: corpus_chunks
    default: true
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: parquet/chunks/*.parquet
  - config_name: travel_scenarios
    data_files:
      - split: test
        path: data/scenarios/travel_scenarios_public.parquet
  - config_name: retrieval_eval
    data_files:
      - split: test
        path: eval/results/retrieval_eval_public.parquet

English Wikivoyage Retrieval 2026-05

I like travel datasets because they are about real places, real constraints, and the small practical questions people ask before they go somewhere. I am sharing this English Wikivoyage retrieval corpus in that spirit: as honest work from a researcher-builder who wants to explore the world, make the pipeline inspectable, and let other people reuse or challenge the choices.

This is not presented as a finished travel product or a private leaderboard. It is a concrete public artifact: text chunks, provenance, retrieval pools, scenario probes, and serving files that can be opened, measured, and rebuilt.

The dataset is built for travel-oriented retrieval experiments. It includes a cleaned and chunked Wikivoyage text corpus, explicit retrieval pools, public scenario probes, and serving artifacts for dense, lexical, and hybrid search. The first companion use case is a Hugging Face Space for destination and travel search demos:

vincentss/wikivoyage-playground

What To Look At First

Start with the corpus_chunks viewer table. It is the default Dataset Viewer config and shows the actual text chunks, page and section provenance, retrieval pool assignment, source URL, and public quality flags. This is the canonical corpus artifact. The Lance, SQLite, and FAISS files are serving artifacts derived from this corpus.

Then look at travel_scenarios and retrieval_eval to see the question shapes used to probe the system and how the released retrieval routes behaved.

Research Angle

The main contribution is not simply embedding Wikivoyage. The useful part is the travel-aware data shape: page cleaning, section-aware chunks, listing-aware metadata, retrieval pools, and scenario probes that reflect how people ask travel questions.

The release is intentionally experimental. It is meant to be realistic enough to run a demo or rebuild a retriever, while staying honest about limits: English Wikivoyage only, lightweight public probes, no media embeddings, and no claim that it replaces current official travel guidance.

Contents

The v2 release is organized around three inspectable dataset configs:

Config	File(s)	Purpose
corpus_chunks	parquet/chunks/*.parquet	Canonical public chunk corpus for inspection and re-embedding.
travel_scenarios	data/scenarios/travel_scenarios_public.parquet	Realistic public travel queries and intended route pools.
retrieval_eval	eval/results/retrieval_eval_public.parquet	Public aggregate retrieval metrics by backend/route.

It also includes practical serving artifacts:

• lance/bge_m3_1024.lance
• indexes/sqlite_fts5/
• indexes/faiss/bge_m3_1024/
• data/scenarios/travel_scenarios_public.jsonl
• eval/results/retrieval_eval_public.jsonl
• data/schema/chunks_schema.json
• data/schema/retrieval_eval_schema.json
• space/contract.json
• manifest.json
• checksums.sha256
• LICENSE_DATA

See manifest.json for exact file sizes, checksums, row counts, and release lineage.

Source And Attribution

Source project: English Wikivoyage.

Source data comes from public Wikimedia project dumps. Row-level artifacts preserve page title, source URL, and revision URL where available. This dataset is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Source text is copyright Wikimedia contributors and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted. Dataset artifacts derived from Wikivoyage text, including embeddings and search indexes, are released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

See LICENSE_DATA for links and attribution guidance.

Intended Use

This dataset is intended for:

• travel search demos;
• vector, lexical, and hybrid retrieval experiments;
• LanceDB and local-index provisioning examples;
• retrieval-augmented answer prototypes over Wikivoyage content;
• research inspection of travel-aware chunking and retrieval routing.

It is not intended for:

• safety-critical travel advice;
• replacing current official travel guidance;
• broad Wikimedia corpus claims;
• media/image retrieval unless a future release explicitly includes media artifacts.

Known Limitations

• English Wikivoyage only.
• Scenario checks are realistic probes, not exhaustive relevance judgments.
• Listing chunks intentionally dominate raw row count, so retrieval should route by retrieval_pool and apply caps/diversity for broad destination queries.
• Media/image embeddings are not included.
• Remote query performance depends on Hugging Face Hub and Space hardware limits.

Citation

If this dataset is useful, please cite the dataset repository and attribute the underlying Wikivoyage source pages through the row-level URLs. If you redistribute modified versions, preserve compatible CC BY-SA attribution and share-alike terms.