On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 17 May 2012 13:32, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Because they are XML dumps, mainly. The data in the WMF database is compressed in a format which can be easily randomly accessed.
It's a dump.
Not really. Yes, it's called that. And historically, it was that, but the XML "dumps" aren't really dumps at all.
It's not supposed to be randomly accessed. We're talking about archives, not mirrors.
That's why I said they're semi-useless (i.e. half-useless), not useless.