[Foundation-l] Historical wikipedia dumps

Fri Aug 22 12:13:04 UTC 2008

I think that's a fascinating idea. But then, I'm a history buff.

Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> Once I had this idea: a tool that shows Wikipedia at a certain, chosen
> point of time. For example, I'd like to browse through Wikipedia
> seeing always the state of January 1st 2003. Image if Wikipedia were
> already decades old and we could read the state of 1965. (One can
> always use the version history, yes, but that's more work for the
> reader.) Maybe this is something more interesting to a historian like
> me than to other people. :-)
> Ziko
>
>
> 2008/8/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>   
>> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 8:33 AM, mboverload <mboverloadlister at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> Does anyone know where old database dumps are kept?  (all revisions
>>> preferable).  I asked in #wikimedia-tech but was told that that
>>> Wikimedia does not keep that kind of thing.
>>>
>>> Anyone have any ideas?  It's for a project to develop a new grammar
>>> checker that needs to see how articles are created and deleted over
>>> time - thus just the old revisions wouldn't work.
>>>
>>> I thought this quote was a good one, and would be an acceptable solution.
>>>
>>>  "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important
>>> stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"
>>>        Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20). Post to linux.dev.kernel
>>> newsgroup. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
>>>       
>> There is no a lot of sense to keep historical dumps because the only
>> "historical information" from such dumps would be a timestamp and,
>> possibly, a different file format (it is XML now, it was SQL in the
>> past). All relevant historical informations which are kept inside of
>> the dumps are inside of the latest database dump.
>>
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>>     
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