Dear all,
Thanks to the feedback from Wikimedia developers, version 2.0-beta2 of the Memento time travel extension for Mediawiki is now available for testing and feedback. The extension can be downloaded via [1]. Information on the extension is available at [2]. A demonstration wiki equipped with the extension is available at [3].
The extension is fully compliant with the Memento specification [4], soon to be released as an RFC. The effort is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is a collaboration between Old Dominion University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The Memento protocol extends HTTP to support content negotiation with time, allowing one to view past versions of web pages. This document [5] provides insight into the added value that the protocol brings to MediaWiki. The 1-minute screencam [6] and the 10-minute screencam [7] show Memento at work in the Web at large. The latter pays significant attention to temporal navigation in Wikipedia, and hence illustrates that the Memento Team considers time travel in MediaWiki platforms a major use case of the protocol.
The Memento protocol is not yet natively supported by browsers but a fully functional extension for Chrome is available [8]. The Memento Team hopes that adoption by MediaWiki platforms, in addition to the existing adoption by major web archives [9] and support by the International Internet Preservation Consortium [10], may lead browser manufacturers to consider implementation.
The Memento team is appreciative of all of the feedback from the Wikimedia team and is eager to get additional input on the extension in order to guide its further development to a state that fully meets the MediaWiki community's needs. Feedback on all issues is greatly appreciated as we work to improve the code base.
Shawn M. Jones on behalf of the Memento Team http://www.cs.odu.edu/~sjone/
[1] https://github.com/hariharshankar/mediawiki/releases/tag/2.0-beta2 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento [3] http://ws-dl-05.cs.odu.edu/demo-302-recommended-relations/ [4] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/ [5] http://www.mementoweb.org/wikipedia/ [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_70lQPOOIg [7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtZHKeFwjzk [8] http://bit.ly/memento-for-chrome [9] http://mementoweb.org/depot/ [10] http://netpreserve.org