[Foundation-l] Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?

Thu Jun 2 17:48:27 UTC 2011

Sure Tom, here's a SciFi user story:

In 2016 San Francisco has a major earthquake and the servers and
operational facilities for the WMF are damaged beyond repair. The
emergency hot switchover to Hong Kong is delayed due to an ongoing DoS
attack from Eastern European countries. The switchover eventually
appears successful and data is synchronized with Hong Kong for the
next 3 weeks. At the end of 3 weeks, with a massive raft of escalating
complaints about images disappearing, it is realized that this is a
result of local data caches expiring. The DoS attack covered the
tracks of a passive data worm that only activates during back-up
cycles and the loss is irrecoverable due backups aged over 2 weeks
being automatically deleted. Due to no archive strategy it is
estimated that the majority of digital assets have been permanently
lost and estimates for 60% partial reconstruction from remaining cache
snapshots and independent global archive sites run to over 2 years of
work.

Cheers,
Fae
--
http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae
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On 2 June 2011 18:27, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 June 2011 14:21, Fae <faenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Briefly responding to a couple of points raised so far:
>>
>> Yes, there is a need for a policy as otherwise the WMF would have no
>> long term operational archive plan.
>
> Why would we have an archive plan? Archives are for things that aren't
> expected to needed on a regular basis any more but may need to be
> referred to in the future. We're not going to archive things on
> Commons, they'll just stay on Commons indefinitely.
>
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