[Foundation-l] Historical wikipedia dumps

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> 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. :-)

Yes, it is interesting. I was thinking about that, too :) The only
problem is that such possibility would use a lot of computing
resources or a lot of storage resource. So, there is a need for a lot
of work to make it available on web. While the computing rule "extract
pages earlier than" shouldn't be very complex, it may take a lot of
time for generation of such extract (a couple of hours? a couple of
days? -- on an ordinary computer).

Such tool may be very interesting for getting large picture not only
about Wikipedia (and other Wikimedian projects), but about events,
global and local social developments, public persons, as well as about
Wikimedians themselves.

Also, for a lot of historical informations it is not necessary to make
exactly such tool. It is possible to browse histories of the pages or
to make some much simpler tool for connecting them. And it is true
that historians which job would be to explore the first decade of 21st
century will have much better materials than historians which job
would be to explore the decade earlier.