Now, to be even more useful, database dumps should be produced on *regular* intervals. That way, we can compare various measures such as article growth, link counts or usage of certain words, without having to introduce the exact dump time in the count.
On a related note: I noticed that the meta-info dumps like stub-meta-history.xml.gz etc appear to be generated from the full history dump - and thus fail if the full history dump fails, and get delayed if the full history dump gets delayed.
There are a lot of things that can be done with the meta-info alone, and it seems that dump should be easy and fast to generate. So I propose to genereate it from the database directly, instead of making it depend on the full history dump, which is slow and the most likely to break.
-- daniel