On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Indeed -- as long as the data's accessible I'm content enough -
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023835.html:)
Since then though we've removed it from the data dumps, so it's no longer
possible for third parties to recover and host the pages (or do research on
them) unless they happen to find a copy, and our own redirect points to a
site that's down.
It's too bad (if not entirely surprising) that the external site is no
longer up; in the interest of preserving history
I'd support archiving
a static HTML or read-only wiki (ideally with minimal skin) copy under
some subdirectory URL (
dumps.wikimedia.org/whatever ). If we want to
do a nicer job at it, we might start making a bit of a space for these
collected pieces of wiki-history (Joseph Reagle's Wikipedia 10K Redux
derived from the first dumps would be another candidate:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~reagle/wp-redux/ )
*nod*
It's probably easier to set up a read-only wiki with similar configuration
to
nostalgia.wikipedia.org and slurp in the last dump than it will be to get
static HTML dumping to work right.
This would also put the sep11 pages back into the downloadable data dumps,
always in whatever the current format is, which I think has a maintenance
benefit over making it a separate sui generis download that might get
forgotten/deleted in the future (or just fall out of date with format
changes).
But, let's please not reactivate
sep11.wikipedia.org as anything other
than a redirect to a different URL, to avoid confusion
of
readers/visitors coming in through search engines (even if we run a
big banner explaining that it's archived for historical purposes, it's
still likely to be confusing to folks under that domain name).
It does look like the Internet Archive nabbed a full copy of it from
sep11memories.org (which had the final cleaned up version of the
wiki).
http://web.archive.org/web/20080807125041/http://www.sep11memories.org/
As long as we keep it online and don't throw it away, I would very much
appreciate keeping it online in some form and keeping a redirect from the
old
sep11.wikipedia.org URL.
If we can't get that organized immediately, I'd recommend at least putting
in a redirect to the Wayback Machine URL asap -- we're just a few days from
the 10th anniversary of the attacks, a very relevant time for people who
might want to link to and comment on the old pages.
-- brion