[Wikipedia-l] Re: What if?

Tue Oct 7 18:10:20 UTC 2003

Björn Lindqvist wrote:

> Now that WP is once again down (which is bad cause I was in an editing 
> mode) I'm getting a little worried about one thing. What if Bomis gets 
> infected by an evil virus or there is a major power outage or one of the 
> admins fuck up majorly or if the cia confiscates the servers or if there 
> is a terrorist attack or if some other really bad thing happen. What 
> will happen to my and thousands of other WP editors contributions? Is it 
> possible that they someday will be lost due to an incident like one of 
> the above? I don't know what I'd do if that ever happened.
> 
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