On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: Deleted articles, oversighted versions, anyone?Ä

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Huib Laurens <sterkebak(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is wrong. the deleted data (and oversight of course) are not available @ down.wm.org -- --alnokta

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. :-) Ziko 2008/8/22 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>: -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde

Ziko van Dijk wrote: Me too, that would be excellent :) Not sure how light on the database it could be made, but it shouldn't be too hard to make static pages frozen at a certain point of time.

Oh, this nostalgia wp still exists, yes. I thought about a tool or a user surface where I simply type "2003-01-01" (as an example) and Wikipedia will show me the articles from that point of time. I understand that there might be problems with deleted images, merged articles, right. But it would still be interesting enough, certainly the older Wikipedia grows. I do not know so much about technical matters, but I can not imagine that such a tool would be very complicated. (?) Greetings Ziko 2008/8/25 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>om>: -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde

I would really like to be able to access at least the _previous_ dumps: this can be very useful when the current dumps are either still running, or are aborted/stopped (as many of them are right now due to disk space issues). Are the previous dumps available anywhere? Luca On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 9:50 PM, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

Client-side might be ideal but also a lot harder to make. Something live-mirrorish would be fairly easy, but would of course violate the "no live mirrors" rule. To go completely server-side would require a *lot* of disk space, and/or some tricky db compression which would eat up lots of CPU cycles. Plus you'd need to find or make a full history dump. I guess if you've got the bandwidth, disk space, and/or CPU cycles to spare you could relatively easily scrape up your own full history dump, though. A mediawiki extension probably wouldn't be too hard, but I don't know mediawiki well enough to be volunteering. For performance reasons it might require a new db table/column/index. I don't think mediawiki tables are optimized for looking up the latest version of a page on a particular date. I might try hacking up a live-mirrorish version next time I get enough free time. Lets see - I'd have to find the right templates, article, categories, and images, presumably working from the stub dump, and then merge them all together. Anything else? Historical skins would be nice but unnecessary, historical parsing algorithms would be cool but probably overkill. Anyone have a tool to recursively parse templates? I always get stuck there trying to make a perfect parser. On a similar note, is there a standalone parser yet, or would I have to import it all into a database? Seems neat, though. One thing that comes to mind is checking out various articles on the days on and around 9/11/01. Anthony On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:50 AM, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 5:14 AM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: You also need the correct versions of the CSS and JS files, which is pain since those file locations have changed over time. If you wanted to be really thorough you'd have to look at the Mediawiki space as well (for example to capture the evolution of the sidebar), but that has the extra wrinkle that the way the Mediawiki engine parses content in the Mediawiki space has also evolved over time. Being completely accurate would be nearly impossible, but one could do a good approximation with enough effort. -Robert Rohde

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

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 6:19 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: Anyone know when the last valid full history database dump was? I've got a 134 gig one from 20080103, but I seem to remember that being corrupt. I'm also not sure if I missed a more recent one.