Dear all,
I am happy to announce that a Memento time travel extension for MediaWiki is now available for testing and feedback. The extension can be downloaded via [1] and requires MediaWiki version 1.21.1+. A demonstration wiki equipped with the Memento extension is available [2].
The extension is fully compliant with the Memento specification [3] that will soon be released as an RFC. This new extension is the result of a significant re-engineering effort guided by feedback received from Wikipedia experts to a previous version [4]. 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 with content negotiation in the datetime dimension. The document [5] is helpful to get an insight in the added value that support for the protocol can bring to MediaWiki platforms. The 1-minute screencam [6] and the 10-minute screencam [7] illustrate 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 eager to get feedback to the extension in order to guide its further development to a state where it fully meet the needs of the MediaWiki community. A separate mail will list some issues that came up during the development process to which explicit feedback is solicited. But feedback beyond those issues is very welcome and hopefully some experienced extension developers will find the time to scrutinize the code base and help us to improve it.
Very much looking forward to your feedback.
Herbert Van de Sompel on behalf of the Memento Team
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento
[2] http://ws-dl-05.cs.odu.edu/demo-302-recommended-relations/
[3] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/
[4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34778
[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