# AGENTS.md Guidance for agents and contributors adding a source and cutting a release. Read this before opening a PR — several recent contributions added data but skipped the doc/version bump, forcing a maintainer cleanup release. ## How the docs are actually maintained `src/make_docs.py` is a **scaffolding/assembly helper, not a round-trip source of truth.** It regenerates the README source table + release totals, `LICENSE`, a `CHANGELOG` stub, and *template* datasheets — but it does **not** reproduce the committed docs on its own: - It iterates `SOURCES` in `src/sources.py`; any source in `data/` but missing from `SOURCES` is silently dropped from the table and totals. - It stamps every regenerated datasheet's "Added" with the single global `ADDED` constant, overwriting real per-source add dates. - It cannot reproduce hand-written README narrative (audit notes, policy notes, the phrase-frequency section). So datasheets and the README narrative are **hand/contributor-maintained**. Never run `make_docs.py` and commit the result blind — `git diff` first and restore anything it dropped or restamped. ## Before you start: check the findings log `artifacts/source_findings.md` records sources already investigated, including the rejected ones and *why*. Check it before spending a day on a source someone already found to be blocked — and append your own finding there whether the answer was yes or no. ## Add a source 1. Produce the artifact under `data//`: - `.parquet` — built by `src/build_dynaword.py` (LFS-tracked automatically). - `.stats.json` — doc/token/char counts (drives all totals). - `.md` — datasheet (see below). 2. Add the ingestion script: `src/fetch_.py` or `src/clean_.py`, so the source is reproducible. `build_source` (build_dynaword.py) expects a `.jsonl.zst` intermediate. 3. Register the source in `src/sources.py` (`SOURCES`) — required, or make_docs never sees it. Copy an existing entry's shape: `pretty`, `license`, `license_spdx`, `traceable`, `upstream`, `domain`, `created`, `is_ocr`, and the `speakleash_key`/`file_key`. If the datasheet is hand-authored (rich provenance or a fixed add date), add `"custom_datasheet": True` so make_docs leaves it alone. 4. Add a contract test: `src/test__contract.py` (canonical schema, non-empty text, positive token counts, uniform source/license, stats-file consistency). Run `python3 -m pytest src/` before committing. ## What the PR must show These two are not optional — they are the difference between a source a reviewer can accept and one that sits in the queue. Treat every source PR as a worked example other contributors will copy. 1. **A sample of the data, inline in the PR description.** A few real documents (or truncated ones), verbatim, so a reviewer can see at a glance what kind of text this actually is — prose, transcripts, boilerplate, OCR noise, HTML leftovers. Include the metadata columns too, not just `text`. Don't make the reviewer download a parquet to find out. 2. **Provenance and licensing, written out in the datasheet (`data//.md`) and summarized in the PR description:** - Where the data comes from — the concrete origin (institution, portal, API, dump), not just a domain name. Link it. - Under what license, and **where that license statement lives** — link the exact terms-of-use page, API docs section, or statute. "Public domain because it's government data" is a claim, not a source; cite the provision. - What the texts are — genre, register, time span, language variety, whether they are OCR'd, machine-translated, or user-generated. - How it was collected and filtered — dedup, minimum length, language ID, anything dropped and why. - The argument for inclusion — what this adds that the corpus does not already have, and any known bias or quality caveat a downstream user should weigh. Yes, this is meta work on top of the fetching. That is the point: the datasheet is the artifact other people read to learn how to contribute well. ## Normalize the text before you build `build_dynaword.py` applies only *minimal gates* — strip, `len < 200`, Polish diacritic ratio, OCR alpha ratio, exact sha1 dedup. It does **not** clean text. `src/normalize_schema.py` is a schema/stats tool despite the name; it never touches `text`. So normalization is the fetcher's job, and today each fetcher reimplements it (`fetch_govpl.py:43` and `fetch_saos.py:42` carry byte-identical `html_to_text`; `clean_samorzad_gov_pl.py:65` a third variant). If you are writing a new fetcher, factor the shared parts out rather than pasting a fourth copy. What a fetcher should do to `text` before writing the `.jsonl.zst`: - **Unicode**: NFKC normalize. Map non-breaking/thin/zero-width spaces to plain space (or drop), strip control characters and soft hyphens, normalize the quote/dash/ellipsis zoo. Repair mojibake if the upstream encoding is unreliable. - **Whitespace**: collapse runs of spaces/tabs, trim per line, cap blank runs at one empty line. Do not flatten paragraph breaks — they carry structure. - **Structural junk**: navigation, cookie banners, "share this", pagination, footnote back-references, and — for OCR/PDF sources — page headers/footers, running titles, and hyphenation split across line breaks. - **Numbering**: strip standalone chapter/section/page numbers and repeated heading numerals (`1.`, `Art. 5.`, `Rozdział III`) *only where they are layout artifacts*. In `dziennik_ustaw` or `saos` the article numbering is content — removing it destroys the document. Judge per source, and say what you did in the datasheet. - **Boilerplate**: near-identical blocks repeated across most documents of a source (license footers, institutional disclaimers, "Pokaż odpowiedź"-style UI chrome) should be detected by frequency across the shard and removed, not hand-listed. - **Personal data**: scrub before the parquet is written, not after. At minimum email addresses, phone numbers, and national identifiers (PESEL, NIP, REGON, account numbers). Replace with a stable placeholder (`[PII]`, `[Telefon]`) rather than deleting, so sentence structure survives. Names of public officials acting in an official capacity are not PII and should stay — removing them would gut parliamentary and judicial sources. Two rules about all of the above: 1. **The normalization must live in the committed fetch/clean script**, so the shard is reproducible. A shard whose datasheet describes a cleaning step that no script in `src/` performs is not reproducible, however good the intent. 2. **Report it in the datasheet**: which steps ran, and what the gates dropped. Include a handful of before/after excerpts in the PR — this is the fastest way for a reviewer to see whether normalization ate real content. ## Cut the release (the part that gets skipped) 1. In `src/make_docs.py`: bump `VERSION` and `RELEASE_DATE`. Add a row for the new version to the version table and a row for yourself to the Contributors table (both are literal rows in the template). 2. Regenerate the phrase-frequency report and charts (registry-independent — it globs `data/*/*.parquet`): ```bash python3 src/pattern_frequency_report.py ``` Writes `artifacts/pattern_frequency_hf_snippet.md` + 10 PNGs. Splice the tables and chart embeds into the README "Results" section by hand. 3. Update `README.md` by hand: header totals, version table, source table row, Contributors row. The document/token totals must equal the sum of the per-source `stats.json` files. 4. Prepend the release notes to `CHANGELOG.md` under a new `## vX.Y.Z (date)` heading. History is append-only — never rewrite earlier releases. ## Do not commit `*.log` (fetch/build logs), `.DS_Store`, `src/__pycache__/`. Only `logs/` is in `.gitignore` — root-level logs and OS cruft are not, so check `git status` before staging. `*.parquet` is LFS-tracked; commit the pointer, not the blob. ## Known drift / cleanup opportunities - `biblioteka_nauki`, `europeana`, `parlamint_pl` are in `SOURCES` but have no `data/` shard (make_docs skips them with `! no stats`). Intentional placeholders or stale — confirm before relying on `build_dynaword.py --all`. - The global `ADDED` datasheet stamp is a footgun: give datasheets a per-source add date (or `custom_datasheet`) before making make_docs regenerate them.