[Foundation-l] Image dumps, html dumps, and static copies missing

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are there good unofficial sites with mirrors and dumps?  Is anyone using a
>  live feed to generate same?
>
>  Here is one of those core project support tasks that only the Foundation can
>  do at the moment, that never seems to become a priority... but is
>  fundamental to supporting a broad network of people who are carrying out
>  their own Wikipedia and related initiatives.
>
>  Among the core ways that the projects' work gets out into the world is
>  through full dumps provided by the foundation in all languages.  There
>  aren't many people with access to the databases to generate those dumps, and
>  it often requires scheduling machine processor and disk time from inside the
>  cluster to carry out regular dumps effectively.

On the wiki-research list, Sue Gardner recently made a post about
Foundation research priorities:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2008-April/000546.html

There's an associated document on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals

which lists a lot of the things many of us have been interested in
researching for a long time.

Arguably, however, providing solid dumps is the backbone for getting
most of this research getting done, since having project data to
manipulate is necessary for many possible studies. So not only are
regular dumps critical for fulfilling our free content
responsibilities and mission, but they are critical for future
research. Which is to say: we all really want to see them happen! And
agreed, the Foundation is the only one that can make it so (even
though it's not an easy task); and this is the sort of infrastructure
task that should be absolutely core.

-- phoebe