[Foundation-l] Proposal re: sep11.wikipedia.org

[Robert Scott Horning]

Luiz Augusto wrote:

>On 9/26/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
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>>James Hare wrote:
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>>I'm also suggesting that the advocates of shutting down sep11.wikipedia
>>completely are doing so based on irrational fears or emotional
>>justifications, not based on any technical need or hardship to the
>>Wikimedia Foundation.
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>Stop imediatle with [[WP:XFD]] if this is the problem. Wikimedia is a global
>organization or a organization for United States of America?
>sep11.wikipedia(wikipedia??) isn't a global memorial wiki... This is
>the point.
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I'm not trying to suggest that new projects of similar scope be created 
here.  Far from it, and I would be against any similar project from 
being created.  But the point here is that the project has been created 
and does have a community of participants that have been working on it 
for some time.

I'm also not advocating that this project be left on as a fully editable 
public wiki, but I am saying that it appears from the responses and 
comments that have been offered on this mailing list that it is a 
foregone conclusion that this project is not only to be put into 
inactive read-only mode but that it is to be completely removed from the 
Wikimedia Foundation servers.  I am merely trying to raise an objection 
and try to find out exactly why this is being done and instead I'm 
getting emotional responses rather than objective quantifiable 
justifications.

As for objective quantifiable justifications for shutting down 
completely and removing this project from the servers, I mentioned 
network bandwidth and hard drive space.  Since neither of these are 
being used as justification for culling this from Wikimedia servers, I 
leave the rest to other neutral observers to come to their own 
conclusion as to why this is being removed, such as anti-American 
attitudes.  A project that is in a read-only has no need for admins to 
revert vandalism nor is there need to even put the project into the cron 
cycle for the database dumps.  Those are also objective quantifiable 
justifications for culling that also don't seem to be a problem at the 
moment.  That developers would have to perhaps explicitly add some small 
amount of code to the project database processes to make sure it doesn't 
go through the dump process that the rest of Wikimedia project go 
through would be an annoyance, but dealing with broken links going into 
the sep11.wikipedia would also be as much of an issue if it were removed 
completely.

Another very reasonable objection would be to help pay for domain costs, 
such as wikipedia.org, wikibooks.org, etc.  Only there isn't an 
objective monitary cost involved in keeping sep11.wikipedia.org as a 
domain beyond the costs of keeping wikipedia.org, which I don't see as 
being a problem.

I guess there isn't any other advocate to see that this information is 
simply kept and otherwise ignored on Wikimedia servers.  The only reason 
why I'm bringing this up at all is that there is a larger issue involved 
here about what to do with any Wikimedia project that has been closed 
down and otherwise deemed to be "unworthy" of continued support, 
whatever that reason may be.  This includes the Klingon Wikipedia, for 
instance, which is also in read-only mode.  Whatever happens to the 
sep11.wikipedia is going to set a preceedent for all future Wikimedia 
projects that enjoy a similar fate.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning