BRODILOFT/wikifacts_crawled

Wikipedia Did You Know Facts

A plain-text collection of ~41,755 short, self-contained facts taken from Wikipedia's "Did you know..." (DYK) hooks, with April Fools' Day joke hooks removed. Published by BRODILOFT.

Dataset Summary

Each line of the file is one fact written as a complete sentence, for example:

Sow thistles are named because they were fed to lactating sows.
Mary Hallaren was the first woman to join the United States Army.

The facts cover a wide range of topics (people, places, science, sports, games, history, culture) because DYK hooks are drawn from newly created or expanded Wikipedia articles across the whole encyclopedia.

Dataset Structure

There are no splits, labels, or metadata columns. It is just the facts.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("BRODILOFT/wikifacts_crawled", split="train")
print(ds[0]["text"])

Or with no libraries at all:

with open("Wikifacts.txt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    facts = [line.strip() for line in f if line.strip()]

Dataset Creation

Source

All facts come from Wikipedia's "Did you know" hooks. The original wording is written by Wikipedia editors.

Collection

Hooks were collected with a custom Python crawler. Hook lead-ins were stripped so each line reads as a standalone sentence, and exact duplicates were removed.

Filtering

Hooks from April Fools' Day were removed, since those are intentionally false or joke entries. Filtering was automated, so a small number of joke or low-quality hooks may remain.

Limitations and Caveats

• —Snapshot in time. A hook was accurate when it ran on Wikipedia. Statements like "the last surviving member of..." or "the late..." may be out of date.
• —Not fact-checked. These are Wikipedia's hooks as published and were not independently verified. Do not treat them as a source of truth.
• —Uneven coverage. DYK favors new and recently expanded articles, so topics that Wikipedia editors write about most are overrepresented.
• —Real people. Many facts mention real people, including living ones. All of it comes from public Wikipedia content.
• —Wikipedia's biases carry over. The dataset reflects the topic and geographic skews of English Wikipedia.

License and Attribution

The text of this dataset is derived from Wikipedia and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

• —Attribution: Source text is from Wikipedia's "Did you know" hooks, written by Wikipedia contributors. See the history of the corresponding Wikipedia articles for authorship. Wikipedia content is available at <https://www.wikipedia.org>.
• —Share-alike: If you remix or build on this dataset, you must distribute your contributions under the same license.
• —Modifications: hook lead-ins were stripped, entries were deduplicated, and April Fools' Day hooks were removed.

Citation

@misc{brodiloft_wikipedia_dyk_facts,
  title  = {Wikipedia Did You Know Facts},
  author = {BRODILOFT},
  note   = {Derived from Wikipedia "Did you know" hooks. CC BY-SA 4.0.},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/BRODILOFT/wikifacts_crawled}
}

Contact

Website: <https://brodiloft.free.je>