I have recently run my head up against the limitations of the conversion script several times.

It can be very helpful to see if the talk comments refer to the current version of an article, or to a previous version. Sometimes, this is difficult to determine unless one can see the article history.

So, I'd like to see if we couldn't get old.wikipedia.com up and running, as it does not seem like we are making much progress on importing the old history into the new mySQL database.

Yours Mark Christensen

-----Original Message----- From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales@bomis.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 12:43 PM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] History of pages, author issues.

Magnus Manske wrote:

...

• As Wikipedia articles have no author, there's no authorship.

Well, there was a good bit of useful data there. There is authorship in some sense, and we do like to keep the history.

...

• AFAIK, the UseModWiki only stored the changes of the last

two weeks (or

...

something like that).

It was previously two weeks, but I extended it, I forget how long, but our intention is to keep the history more or less permanently, subject to disk space constraints. (But disk space is cheap.)

...

• AFAIK, there will be "old.wikipedia.com", with a patched

UseModWiki that

...

doesn't allow to edit/save articles, only view them, with

the contents from

...

before the switch.

That's right. But we should still see about getting the old history into the new database if it isn't impossible.

...

• The reason why I didn't convert the article history as well as the

"current" versions is simply that I didn't figure out how

to read the

...

UseModWiki history format. I asked several times, even on

the 'pedia, for

...

help, but...

*nod* I don't know the answer to this. I've tried it myself and did not succeed.

Maybe Clifford Adams could help us? [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l