On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Are there good unofficial sites with mirrors and dumps? Is anyone using a live feed to generate same?
Here is one of those core project support tasks that only the Foundation can do at the moment, that never seems to become a priority... but is fundamental to supporting a broad network of people who are carrying out their own Wikipedia and related initiatives.
Among the core ways that the projects' work gets out into the world is through full dumps provided by the foundation in all languages. There aren't many people with access to the databases to generate those dumps, and it often requires scheduling machine processor and disk time from inside the cluster to carry out regular dumps effectively.
On the wiki-research list, Sue Gardner recently made a post about Foundation research priorities: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2008-April/000546.html
There's an associated document on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals
which lists a lot of the things many of us have been interested in researching for a long time.
Arguably, however, providing solid dumps is the backbone for getting most of this research getting done, since having project data to manipulate is necessary for many possible studies. So not only are regular dumps critical for fulfilling our free content responsibilities and mission, but they are critical for future research. Which is to say: we all really want to see them happen! And agreed, the Foundation is the only one that can make it so (even though it's not an easy task); and this is the sort of infrastructure task that should be absolutely core.
-- phoebe