-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of wiki@marcusbuck.org Sent: 06 February 2007 15:43 To: Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] conversion to Phase III (no,you didn't accidentally enter the 2003 archives)
Brion Vibber wrote:
wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
I have investigated the history of the Low Saxon (nds)
Wikipedia a bit. It
was
updated to Phase III software in January 2004.
Apparently lots of edits
got
lost in this process (even the main page vanished).
It should not have caused any lost edits at all, and as
far as I know
there weren't any. You'll have to be more specific?
Note also that the UseModWiki software itself deleted older
edits, so
you'll not see many older edits on some older pages because
the old wiki
software destroyed them long before the conversion.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
Okay, when history wasn't preserved at the old wiki, then it's no wonder I am unable to find so many old versions. So this means that all pages only have one version before conversion, no matter how often they were edited in this time, and this one version shows the _last_ edit and there is no hint whether they were created already earlier, right?
Well, I thought this was an effect of conversion, particularly because of old edit comments like the one at http://nds.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spraken_vun_de_Wel t&diff=prev&oldid=418: "(mol een Anfang, de ole Artikel weer doodblewen bi den Transfer)". It translates to: "just a start, the old article vanished due conversion".
The oldest version of our Main Page is from January 2 2004. I thought it was re-created shortly after conversion, but now I guess the January 2 version is the last edit on the old wiki and conversion took place only after January 2.
Two questions that remain: Are there any dumps left from pre-conversion times? And: How did a 'no history' wiki work? You had to recreate a article after a vandal page-blank? What about GNU-FDL? And this up until 2004 for Low Saxon wiki?
And I need a third question too: Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia%27s_oldest_a rticles you can see, that the articles "WolfgangMozart" and "ThomasEdison" do have more than one version before conversion to Phase II. So, did UseModWiki only delete some of the older edits? When so, which were the criteria?
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?KeptPages
Jared