On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 07:01, Björn Lindqvist wrote: http://downloads.wikipedia.org/ The databases are backed up weekly. I keep a copy of it all at home, and so should you. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Björn Lindqvist wrote: Have no fear, the [[legion of propellerheads]] have each downloaded their very own copy of the English Wikipedia, and copies of the Wikimedia software. A few confessed propellerheads have gone so far as to set up private mirrors and run the software. That is the sort of thing that propellerheads do, in order to get their propeller spinning. Like the [[shadow government]] said to be in waiting deep in bunkers beneath the mountains, shadow Wikipedias sulk quietly in the ether, with no one to make edits on them. They have no DNS entries or links to them to give away their presence. They wait, and from time to time, their keepers download the latest database dumps for them. And the latest PHP. How many are there? Are they connected to the backbone? Could they handle the traffic? We have no way of knowing. There are some holes, such as the list of user IDs, preferences, and passwords, which are not kept in the public backups seeing as how the passwords are kept in the database in plaintext. As a practical matter, however, this is a minor point. Louis