On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
It's fascinating cultural history (both of a country called "the USA" and - more importantly to some here perhaps? - of Wikipedia's early years) -- if we don't want it, well, I think that's a darn shame.
IIRC Erik Moeller was one of the drivers behind moving this tiny collection of pages (much smaller than thousands of other things we host) offsite in '06, and at the time even he seemed to agree that the pages had relevance and should be preserved:
For all your meta-history needs:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/9/11_wiki_move_proposal http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Archive/Septem...
and related links.
Also: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023757.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023819.html ;-)
It's too bad (if not entirely surprising) that the external site is no longer up; in the interest of preserving history I'd support archiving a static HTML or read-only wiki (ideally with minimal skin) copy under some subdirectory URL (dumps.wikimedia.org/whatever ). If we want to do a nicer job at it, we might start making a bit of a space for these collected pieces of wiki-history (Joseph Reagle's Wikipedia 10K Redux derived from the first dumps would be another candidate: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~reagle/wp-redux/ )
But, let's please not reactivate sep11.wikipedia.org as anything other than a redirect to a different URL, to avoid confusion of readers/visitors coming in through search engines (even if we run a big banner explaining that it's archived for historical purposes, it's still likely to be confusing to folks under that domain name).
It does look like the Internet Archive nabbed a full copy of it from sep11memories.org (which had the final cleaned up version of the wiki). http://web.archive.org/web/20080807125041/http://www.sep11memories.org/