[Foundation-l] Historical wikipedia dumps

Sun Aug 24 17:24:01 UTC 2008

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

I think it was discussed before on wikitech-l. Probably when talking 
about implementing stable versions.
Wouldn't be too hard to restrict on a given page to the history data at 
X date. However,
-You would need to reverse page moves.
-When a page was deleted and some revisions restored before the epoch, 
you don't know which ones were restored.
-Page merges would be specially difficult, as they're a mix of the two 
above.