As the person who essentially built the September 11 wiki, I can say that
permanently killing the project on the tenth anniversary of the attacks
would be a telling testament to both the lost opportunities of Wikipedia
itself and of human civilization, which did seem for a fleeting moment to
have a chance at a greater unity, dashed by either realpolitick or a mad
president, depending on how you view the world. Instead, the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq trundle on, outlasting an effort of individual people
to celebrate the wonder and beauty that are the collective lives of an
essentially random and unremarkable collection of people, a reminder that
encyclopedias of the past, that focus only on the glories of the great,
don't truly tell the story of the world.
So it would be nice to figure out how to preserve the collection.
imho.
--tc
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Brion Vibber
<brion(a)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/Septe…
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.htm…)
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/
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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