[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered

Tim Starling tstarling at wikimedia.org
Thu Dec 16 01:14:53 UTC 2010


On 16/12/10 08:04, Joseph Reagle wrote:
> Unfortunately, it doesn't look like versions of the articles beyond
> the first ~10 are automatically recoverable.

There were some changes made to the page text that weren't represented
in diff_log, specifically changing certain camel-case links to free
links. If you can work out what the changes were and when they were
made, you can recover the text. I successfully recovered all 119
revisions of [[Larry Sanger]], using the following transformation
applied after 984005227 UNIX time:

'LarrySanger' => 'Larry Sanger',
'JimboWales' => 'Jimbo Wales',
'WikiPedia' => 'Wikipedia',
'UnitedStates' => 'United States',

I'm not sure how many links were changed in this way, but it seems to
have been a hand-constructed list.

-- Tim Starling




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