# Source investigation findings Running log of sources that were investigated, whether or not they were added. **Append-only, version-independent** — unlike the `*_v0_3.md` artifacts, which are point-in-time snapshots of one release's candidate review. Purpose: stop the same source being re-investigated from scratch every few months. A negative finding is as valuable as a positive one, as long as it records *what was checked* and *what would change the answer*. Related, don't duplicate: - `source_scouting_v0_3.md` — v0.3 candidate shortlist (HuggingFace-centric) - `source_candidate_audit_v0_3.md` — machine-generated audit of those HF cards - `source_license_review_v0_3.md` — v0.3 license decision table ## How to add an entry One `##` section per source. Keep these fields: - **Investigated** — date, so a stale finding is visible as stale. - **Verdict** — `added` / `blocked` / `hold` / `rejected`, plus the one-line reason. - **Enumeration** — how you would actually get the data, or why you can't. - **License evidence** — what you checked, with URLs. Separate what you *verified yourself* from what you read second-hand; label the weak ones. - **Blockers** — what must be resolved before this can ship. - **Lesson** — anything generalizable to other sources. Optional. Write down the API endpoints and quirks you had to dig for. That digging is the expensive part, and it is invisible in a verdict line. --- ## zpe.gov.pl — Zintegrowana Platforma Edukacyjna **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 **Verdict:** `hold` — technically very tractable, blocked on per-material license evidence. Do not build a fetcher until the license question below is answered. Ministry of Education platform (successor to `epodreczniki.pl`), e-materials across all school subjects. Attractive because the corpus has **no modern instructional/pedagogic register at all**, and this is contemporary, clean, editorially reviewed Polish prose. ### Enumeration — solved There is no sitemap (`/sitemap.xml` → 404) and site search is client-side, but `https://zpe.gov.pl/config.js` exposes an undocumented JSON API: ``` window.CP_CONFIGURATION = {... "apiUrl":"https://zpe.gov.pl/api/v1/" ...} ``` ``` GET https://zpe.gov.pl/api/v1/search?query=&limit=20&offset=N → {"count": 23843, "offset": 0, "limit": 20, "data": [{"id": "P18l4AKOi", "title": "Fotosynteza", "subject": [...], "stage": [...], "tags": [], ...}]} ``` Verified directly (2026-08-27): - `count` = **23,843** materials for the empty query. - Deep paging works — `offset=5000` returns rows, no cursor needed. - `robots.txt` is `User-agent: * / Allow: /`. - Article pages `/a//` are **fully server-rendered**; text lives in `data-editor-content` blocks. No JS execution required to extract prose. - Book pages `/b//` render their material list client-side (0 server-side `/a/` links), so `/b/` is useless for crawling. Use the API. Other endpoints probed and 404: `api/v1/materials`, `api/v1/document(s)/`, `api/v1/footer`, `api/v1/menu`, `api/v1/search/materials`. Only `api/v1/search?query=` responded. ### License evidence — the blocker **Verified directly:** - **No document-level license marker exists in the served HTML.** The only machine-readable license strings are per-figure, inside `
`, e.g. `Źródło: GroMar, licencja: CC BY 3.0.` and `Źródło: Sławomir Szaruga, licencja: CC BY 3.0.` These attach to **illustrations, not to the prose**. - **The site footer is `` — JS-rendered.** This matters: the accepted legal basis for both `govpl` and `samorzad_gov_pl` in `src/sources.py` is a *server-side footer string* declaring CC BY-SA 4.0. ZPE has no such string. **That precedent does not transfer to ZPE.** - The platform `regulamin` states: *"Korzystanie z Materiału odbywać się może tylko i wyłącznie w zakresie dozwolonym przepisami ustawy o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych"* — statutory permitted-use only, which is not an open license. Reading the surrounding clauses, this section appears scoped to material *uploaded by users to* the platform rather than to ministry e-materials, but the wording is not self-limiting and a reviewer will land on it. **Second-hand, not verified — confirm before relying on any of it:** - Ministry-produced e-materials are said to be CC BY 3.0, funded under POKL 2007–2013 / POWER 2014–2020. - User-contributed materials are reported to carry **CC BY-NC-SA 4.0**. NC is already on the reject list (`source_scouting_v0_3.md`), so those must be excluded, not merely flagged. - Literary works embedded in e-materials are reported to sit under a non-free *"licencja edukacyjna"* where authors or heirs did not agree to open release. This is the highest-risk content class on the platform. ### Consequences for design - ZPE cannot be a single-license shard. It has to be **per-record license-gated**, `license_spdx: MIXED`, same shape as `biblioteka_nauki` and `europeana`. - Available heuristic, **not** license evidence: ministry materials come back with `subject` and `stage` populated; user uploads return `"subject": [], "stage": []` (the first empty-query result is an all-caps user upload with both empty). Usable as a pre-filter, useless as provenance. - Rough size if ~10–15k ministry materials survive the gate: **~30–100M tokens**. Estimate only — nothing was counted. Good register, modest scale. ### Extraction hazards (seen in a single sampled page) - Interactive-exercise chrome: `Pokaż podpowiedź`, `Pokaż odpowiedź` buttons. - JSON blobs embedded in `data-editor-params` attributes (`gameTitle`, `feedbackPositive`, …) — must not leak into `text`. - Per-figure attribution lines repeated throughout the body. - Glossary / `Zapamiętaj!` boilerplate repeated across many materials — needs frequency-based boilerplate detection, not a hand-written blocklist. ### What would unblock this Any one of: a resolvable per-material license field (API or page markup); an authoritative ORE/MEN page granting open reuse of e-material *text*; or written permission. Absent that, ZPE stays out — the datasheet could not honestly answer "where does the license statement live", which is a required field for any PR. ### Lesson Check for a **server-rendered** license statement early. A JS-rendered footer is not usable license evidence, and "it's a `gov.pl` domain" is not a license — the `govpl` and `samorzad_gov_pl` entries hold up because a specific footer string was fetched and quoted, not because of the domain. --- ## ParlaMint-PL — parliamentary debates 2015–2022 **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 **Verdict:** `ready to build, low yield` — license and distribution verified, the fetcher is the only missing piece. But it is a **date-hole patch worth ~36M net-new tokens**, not a diversity win. Size it before prioritising it. Already registered in `src/sources.py` as `parlamint_pl`, but there is **no shard in `data/`**. ### Size — measured, not guessed From the official stats at `github.com/clarin-eric/ParlaMint/tree/v5.0/Build/Metadata` (`ParlaMint-overview-stats.tsv`, `ParlaMint-speeches-stats.tsv`): ``` ID Lang Bodies Ts From To Yrs Mw/Yr Mw PL pl low+upp 4 2015-11 2022-06 6.7 5.35 36.06 ``` - **36.06M words**, **228,326 speeches**, 4 terms, both chambers. - Token conversion measured on our own `parliamentary` shard (same register, same cl100k encoder; 6,000 docs / 9.7M words): **2.654 tokens/word**, 7.24 chars/word. - → **~96M tokens gross**, ≈1% of the current 9.68B corpus. - Download: `ParlaMint-PL.tgz`, 185.3 MB. ### Overlap with the existing `parliamentary` shard — the real issue ParlaMint-PL is **derived from PPC**, which is exactly what the `parliamentary` shard is (1991–2019). Time overlap runs 2015-11 → 2019-12, about 4.2 of the 6.7 years, ≈22M words likely already present. **Net new ≈ 14M words ≈ 36M tokens**, covering 2020-01 → 2022-06. That estimate is soft in both directions: - `parliamentary` has **no per-document dates** — `created` is the single literal `'1991-01-01, 2019-12-31'` on all 324,622 rows. The overlap cannot be measured by filtering, only by comparing content. - PPC includes committee sittings and interpellations; ParlaMint-PL is plenary only. So ParlaMint's 2015–2019 portion is plausibly a *subset* of what already ships, making the real overlap higher than the time-share implies. **Exact dedup will not catch this.** `build_dynaword.py` dedups on `sha1` of the whole document. ParlaMint ships one document per session; PPC's segmentation differs, so byte-identical documents are unlikely and the duplicates pass straight through the gate. This needs **near-dedup, for which the repo has no committed tooling** — the HPLT expansion's near-dedup was run outside `src/`. Budget for that, or the shard silently duplicates existing data. ### Version note **ParlaMint 5.0 does not extend Polish** — PL still ends 2022-06, same as the 3.0 deposit already cited in `sources.py` (handle `11356/1486`; 5.0 is `11356/2004`). Upgrading buys corrections, not coverage. Neither version closes the gap to `sejm_api` (2023 onward): mid-2022 through end-2022 stays empty. ### Verified - CLARIN.SI handle `11356/1486` resolves (HTTP 200). The `upstream` URL recorded in `sources.py` is correct and live. - License: **CC BY 4.0**, stated on the repository record. - ParlaMint 3.0 overall: 26 comparable corpora, 7,468,674 utterances, 1,147,800,265 words; debates mostly 2015 → mid-2022. - The distribution ships a **plain-text (`.txt`) edition** alongside TEI/XML and linguistically-annotated `.ana.xml`. Filenames are per-session, e.g. `ParlaMint-PL_2017-07-20-sejm-46-3.txt`. Use the `.txt` edition — no TEI parsing needed. - Polish covers **both chambers**: `-sejm-` and `-senat-` session files. ### Why it is still worth doing Fills 2020 → mid-2022, between `parliamentary` (ends 2019) and `sejm_api` (2023 onward). Same CC-BY-4.0 family as existing sources, so there is no new license question to answer, and the plain-text edition means no TEI parsing. Cheap. Just do not expect it to move the totals — and do not build it before a source that adds a register the corpus lacks. ### Drift found while checking `src/sources.py` (the `parlamint_pl` `provenance` field) states the corpus was *"Fetched directly from the CLARIN.SI plain-text edition (ParlaMint-PL.tgz) by `src/fetch_parlamint.py`"*. **That script does not exist in `src/`.** The provenance describes a fetch that no committed code performs. Either write the script or correct the field before this ships. --- ## Sejm API — interpelacje and zapytania poselskie **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 **Verdict:** `hold — recheck`. Not a license problem; `api.sejm.gov.pl` was unreachable from the investigating network on the day, so the endpoints could not be confirmed. Retry before writing anything off. ### What happened - `api.sejm.gov.pl` resolves (`194.41.12.231`) but every request hangs and then fails — plain `curl` times out at 45s, a proxied fetch returns `ECONNRESET`. - `https://www.sejm.gov.pl/` responds normally (302), and other external hosts were fine the same session, so this is specific to the API host: either an outage, or that host filtering the source network. - `src/fetch_sejm_api.py` (committed, working) uses this same host, so the API is normally reachable. Treat as transient until proven otherwise. ### Unverified — what to check on retry - Whether `sejm/term{N}/interpellations` and `sejm/term{N}/writtenQuestions` exist, and their paging parameters. - Whether the **ministry's reply body** is retrievable as text, or only as a linked PDF. This decides whether the source is worth building: the replies are the substantial half. - Document counts per term. ### Why it is on the list Reuses the existing `fetch_sejm_api.py` legal basis unchanged — official parliamentary materials outside copyright under art. 4(2) pr. aut., reusable under the Open Data Act. Question/answer prose is argumentative register, which the corpus is short on. No new license work needed. --- ## CLARIN-PL DSpace (PELCRA Spokes, and the `1000_novels` upstream) **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 **Verdict:** `blocked — temporary`. The repository is down for reorganization. Nothing to decide until it returns. ### Verified - `https://clarin-pl.eu/dspace/` serves a maintenance notice: *"Trwają prace nad repozytorium. Prowadzimy prace serwisowe oraz reorganizację repozytorium DSpace… Repozytorium będzie ponownie dostępne wkrótce."* - Every item handle under it 404s: `11321/312`, `11321/544`, `11321/545`, `11321/547` — nginx 404, not a DSpace "item not found". - The global resolver is broken for this prefix too: `hdl.handle.net/11321/*` returns **HTTP 500**. So no PELCRA record (Spokes, EMO, PARL, EMI) can have its license checked right now. Conversational Polish remains the corpus's biggest register gap, so this is worth re-checking periodically. ### Side effect on shipped data `src/sources.py` records `https://clarin-pl.eu/dspace/handle/11321/312` as the `upstream` for **`1000_novels`**, which is a released shard. That URL currently does not resolve. Presumed temporary, but the citation in a published datasheet is dead as of this date. ### Expected concern when it returns PELCRA spoken corpora are transcribed private conversation. Expect NC-flavoured or restricted licensing, and expect a personal-data question — these recordings involve identifiable private individuals, not public officials acting officially. Both must be resolved before use. --- ## NIK — Najwyższa Izba Kontroli audit reports **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 **Verdict:** `hold` — permissive but **non-standard** license, and enumeration is unsolved. Viable with work; not a quick win. ### License evidence — verified `https://www.nik.gov.pl/zasady/prawa-autorskie.html` states: > *"Korzystanie z materiałów publikowanych w serwisach internetowych Najwyższej > Izby Kontroli nie wymaga uzyskania zgody NIK. Nie dotyczy to elementów odrębnie > zastrzeżonych (do których prawa autorskie przysługują osobom trzecim), w > szczególności oznaczonych materiałów zdjęciowych oraz tekstów publikowanych > pierwotnie w innych źródłach."* Attribution to *"Najwyższa Izba Kontroli (nik.gov.pl)"* is requested, not required. Assessment: a **custom permissive notice, not a standard open license** — no CC, no CC0, no SPDX identifier. It carries a third-party carve-out that matters here, because audit reports quote external sources. A separate and probably stronger argument is that audit reports are *materiały urzędowe* under art. 4 pkt 2 pr. aut., the same basis as `dziennik_ustaw` and `sejm_api`. If this source is built, lead with the statutory argument and cite the site notice as corroboration. ### Enumeration — unsolved - `robots.txt` allows crawling, but disallows `/szukaj/`, `/p/`, `/g2/`, `/cms/`, `/do_druku/`. `/g2/` looks like the file store, which likely means **report PDFs are off-limits to crawlers**. - `/kontrole/wyniki-kontroli-nik/` returns 200 (~72 kB) but the report list is **JS-rendered**: zero report links in the server HTML, only pagination scaffolding (`fmax,js,strona,1.html`). - The `/prosta/` ("simple") variant is also JS-rendered — 0 report links. - No `/sitemap.xml` (404). Same shape as ZPE: a backend API almost certainly exists and would need to be found (check the page's JS config for an `apiUrl`, as worked for ZPE). ### Verdict rationale Register value is real — long-form analytical prose, unlike statute text. But between a bespoke license, a third-party-content carve-out, PDF paths blocked by `robots.txt`, and unsolved enumeration, this is several days of work. Lower priority than ParlaMint-PL or Sejm interpelacje. --- ## Billion-scale survey — what can actually move the totals **Investigated:** 2026-08-27 Context: most candidates land at 30–200M tokens, which is noise against a 9.68B corpus. This entry records the only options measured at **500M–5B**, i.e. comparable to `european_hplt_v3_pl` (2.56B), `eurlex` (2.38B), `parliamentary` (1.65B). All numbers below were measured on the day, not taken from cards. Token conversion throughout: **2.654 tokens/word**, measured on the repo's own `parliamentary` shard (6,000 docs / 9.7M words, cl100k). Use it instead of guessing — Polish runs far above the ~1.3 rule of thumb for English. | candidate | measured | est. tokens | license | blocker | |---|---|---|---|---| | SAOS judgments | 540,338 docs, mean 3,067 w | **~4.4B** (floor ~2.8B) | art. 4 pkt 2 pr. aut. | register: pure legal | | FineWeb-2 `pol_Latn` | 152,003,298 docs, 225.9 GB | ~83B raw, **4–8B** filtered | ODC-By | dedup vs existing HPLT | | PleIAs/Polish-PD | 68,176 docs, 0.75B words | **~2.0B** nominal | public domain | OCR corruption | | HPLT leftovers | shards `8_5`, `8_6`, 31.6 GB | ~230M | CC0 | none — just small | ### SAOS — biggest clean win, already half-built `https://www.saos.org.pl/api/search/judgments?pageSize=1&pageNumber=0` reports `totalResults: 540338`. Sampled 100 judgments from `api/dump/judgments?pageSize=100&pageNumber=0`: **mean 3,067 words, median 1,920, p10 816, p90 7,197**, court types `COMMON` and `CONSTITUTIONAL_TRIBUNAL`. 540,338 × 3,067 = 1.66B words → **~4.4B tokens**. Using the median instead, to guard against long-tail skew, still gives ~2.75B. Either way this is **larger than any shard currently in the corpus**. `src/fetch_saos.py` already exists (uncommitted as of this date) and documents the legal basis: judgments are *materiały urzędowe* outside copyright under art. 4 pkt 2 pr. aut., redistributed by SAOS (CeON/ICM UW + Fundacja ePaństwo) through a bulk-dump API built for exactly this. Open question before building: judgments are court-anonymised, but that should be **verified on sampled text**, not assumed — this is the one candidate here where personal data is a live risk rather than a formality. Cost of shipping it: legal/official goes from **48% to roughly 65%** of the corpus. That is the trade, and it should be a deliberate decision rather than a side effect of it being the easy build. ### FineWeb-2 Polish — only billion-scale contemporary prose `datasets-server` size endpoint, config `pol_Latn`: **152,003,298 rows / 225.9 GB**. At the measured 0.367 tokens/char that is **~83B tokens raw**. License `odc-by`. Same argument shape as the accepted HPLT basis: the packaging is licensed, the underlying web text is not owned by the publisher. Note that ODC-By is **attribution-required**, unlike HPLT's CC0 — a different obligation shape, and it has to be stated in the datasheet. #### Dedup is not the bottleneck — this was checked, not assumed The obvious worry is overlap with the existing HPLT shard, since both derive from Common Crawl. It is the *smallest* of the problems: - The existing HPLT shard is **1.6M docs against FineWeb-2's 152M**. Even total overlap removes ~1% of candidates (~12% if working from the HQ subset below). - **Internal dedup is already done upstream.** The schema carries `minhash_cluster_size`, i.e. FineWeb-2 ran MinHash per language before release. Cross-dedup against HPLT is still worth doing for hygiene, and the repo still has no committed near-dedup tooling — but it is not what makes this source expensive. #### The actual blocker: the HPLT gate cannot be ported FineWeb-2 `pol_Latn` columns are: ``` text, id, dump, url, date, file_path, language, language_score, language_script, minhash_cluster_size, top_langs ``` `src/clean_hplt_v3.py` filters on **WDS quality score, register class (ID/OP/HI/IN/NA), and MT-probability**. *None of those exist in FineWeb-2.* Every signal the existing web pipeline depends on is absent, so "filter it like we filtered HPLT" is not an option — it would mean building quality classification over 152M documents from scratch. #### `epfml/FineWeb2-HQ` — the better target A published quality-filtered derivative, config `pol_Latn`: - **13,384,885 rows**, `odc-by`, 180.4 GB parquet (size dominated by an `embeddings` column, not text). - Adds a **`quality_score`** column, retained per document, so the selection threshold stays a tunable knob instead of a baked-in decision — and the classifier is someone else's published work, which is easier to cite than a home-grown one. - Sampled 880 docs across 22 evenly-spread offsets: **mean 2,663 chars/doc** → ~13.1B tokens for the whole HQ subset. Larger than the entire current corpus. #### quality_score → token yield Distribution from the `statistics` endpoint (computed on a **partial 407,184-row sample**, not all 13.4M): min 0.013, max 0.9999, mean 0.145, **median 0.0496** — heavily right-skewed, so most of HQ still scores low. Doc fractions from that histogram, mean lengths from the 880-doc sample: | `quality_score` ≥ | % docs | docs | mean chars | est. tokens | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:| | 0.00 (all) | 100% | 13,384,885 | 2,663 | **13.1B** | | 0.11 | 31.0% | 4,149,000 | 2,375 | **3.6B** | | 0.21 | 20.0% | 2,677,000 | 2,074 | **2.0B** | | 0.31 | 14.6% | 1,954,000 | 1,929 | **1.4B** | | 0.41 | 11.1% | 1,486,000 | 1,912 | **1.0B** | | 0.51 | 8.5% | 1,138,000 | 1,798 | **0.75B** | | 0.70 | 4.8% | 642,000 | 1,750 | **0.41B** | | 0.90 | 1.8% | 241,000 | 914 | **0.08B** | A second pass computing fractions directly from the 880-doc sample agreed with these within ~15%. Treat them as ±20%, good enough to pick a threshold. **Watch out: `quality_score` anti-correlates with document length.** Mean length falls from 2,663 chars at no threshold to 914 at ≥0.90. The classifier is not rewarding long-form prose, so raising the threshold costs more tokens than the doc-count alone implies, and it may actively select *against* the extended prose this corpus is short on. Sample the text at whatever threshold is chosen before committing to it. #### Recommended operating point **Threshold ≈ 0.20 → ~2.7M docs, ~2.0–2.3B tokens.** Comparable to the largest existing shards (`european_hplt_v3_pl` 2.56B, `eurlex` 2.38B) and it *improves* the balance rather than wrecking it: web goes 26% → ~41%, legal drops 48% → ~39%. Taking all 13.1B instead would put the corpus at ~22.7B with **web at ~69%** — trading "two-thirds legalese" for "two-thirds crawl". Same failure, different axis. #### Work order if this is built 1. Pick HQ vs full, and a `quality_score` threshold (see above). 2. **Build the PII scrub.** `sources.py` already claims one for the HPLT shard that has no implementing code in `src/`; shipping a second web source with the same gap is indefensible. 3. Near-dedup against the existing HPLT shard — needed, but ~1–12% effect. 4. Compute. Tokenizing billions of tokens is the genuinely expensive step. ### PleIAs/Polish-PD — good on paper, rough in practice 68,176 rows. Sampled `word_count` at four offsets (n=200): **mean 10,971 words, median 8,468** → ~0.75B words → **~2.0B tokens**. Columns are `identifier`, `file`, `title`, `creator`, `language`, `word_count`, `character_count`, `complete_text`. Public domain, pre-1884 monographs and periodicals, largely sourced from Polish digital libraries (`jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl` in the sample). Register-wise this is the most attractive of the three — books and periodicals, against a corpus that is only 1.9% literature. But the OCR is bad. First sampled record (an 1817 newspaper) opens: ``` U RUSKI czwaRTEŁ SONAER 5 PC Nę R WIADOMOŚC ``` with pre-1884 orthography throughout (`Nayiaśnieyszy`, `roskazać`, `klassy`). **The existing OCR gate will not catch this.** `build_dynaword.py` applies `MIN_ALPHA_RATIO = 0.70` when `is_ocr: True`, which tests the ratio of letters to symbols. Garbled *words* made of ordinary letters pass it cleanly. Filtering this source needs a dictionary- or perplexity-based check, which does not exist here. Treat the 2.0B as nominal; real usable yield is materially lower. ### HPLT is exhausted — correction to an earlier assumption `https://data.hplt-project.org/three/sorted/pol_Latn/` lists **exactly 19 shards**: `10_1`, `9_1`–`9_4`, `8_1`–`8_6`, `7_1`–`7_4`, `6_1`–`6_2`, `5_1`–`5_2`. **There are no WDS bins below 5 for Polish.** `sources.py` records 17 of those as ingested. The only unused shards are **`8_5` (24.24 GB)** and **`8_6` (7.37 GB)** — roughly 230M tokens at the post-filter rate implied by the existing shard. So "add more HPLT bins" is not a path to billions. It is one small top-up, and then the source is finished. ### Conclusion Every clean billion-scale Polish source is **legal, official, or archaic** — which follows directly from what falls outside copyright. The only billion-scale contemporary general prose is web crawl, and that is a re-derivation of Common Crawl the corpus already draws on. If the goal is raw scale: SAOS. If the goal is a corpus that is not two-thirds legalese, **there is no billion-scale option**, and the honest plan is a number of 50–200M-token sources across different registers.