[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Policy governance ends

Wed Apr 18 15:18:50 UTC 2007

  > By the way, we still don't have a good full-history dump of en:wp
> online and I can't remember last time we had a good Commons image
> dump.
> 
> See also http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
> - what do we do in the event the Foundation fails?
> 
> (answer: anyone who wants to wipe Wikipedia from the face of the earth
> only has until the next good en:wp history dump.)

en.wikipedia would survive. I'm more afraid of the little wikis. They 
have full
dumps, right, but how many copies of them are out there?
And not so many people will download the full dump and share it if 
something breaks here. Jeff Merkey, and some statistics studies would, 
but ihaveanemptydomainandwanttoleechcontent.com won't.

I guess that if a hurricane broke the tampa cluster now we could
get the content back from the feed subscriptions :/

-Who are you?
As you know the user table is secret because it's what is used to 
identify users. A centralized system is the easier.
With OpenID you would need to store the user url. And on that url there 
would be a user table stored (maybe even by WMF, too). Not an 
improvement for a general breakage.
I was going to suggest we could publish some user db data with yet 
another hashing layer, but we can't. We sure have too many users with a 
one-letter password.
But don't worry. Users table are so small that Brion can save them under 
his pillow ;-)

About the forks
Wikimedia projects have something more than the database. They have a 
great userbase.
As long as WMF accomplishes what users want, WMF will have the supremacy 
over db copiers. Many people copy our articles, but so long, only 
citizendium has been a threat, and that because it takes a different 
approach (and had a lot of publicity).

If WMF defrauds its userbase, there will be forks anyway, as there were 
on the past, like the [[Enciclopedia Libre]], which is still being 
developed in paralell.

If data is destroyed by a natural disaster, WMF will need to hold firm 
to avoid that disperssion.