[Foundation-l] Historical wikipedia dumps

[Ziko van Dijk]

Once I had this idea: a tool that shows Wikipedia at a certain, chosen
point of time. For example, I'd like to browse through Wikipedia
seeing always the state of January 1st 2003. Image if Wikipedia were
already decades old and we could read the state of 1965. (One can
always use the version history, yes, but that's more work for the
reader.) Maybe this is something more interesting to a historian like
me than to other people. :-)
Ziko


2008/8/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 8:33 AM, mboverload <mboverloadlister at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does anyone know where old database dumps are kept?  (all revisions
>> preferable).  I asked in #wikimedia-tech but was told that that
>> Wikimedia does not keep that kind of thing.
>>
>> Anyone have any ideas?  It's for a project to develop a new grammar
>> checker that needs to see how articles are created and deleted over
>> time - thus just the old revisions wouldn't work.
>>
>> I thought this quote was a good one, and would be an acceptable solution.
>>
>>  "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important
>> stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"
>>        Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20). Post to linux.dev.kernel
>> newsgroup. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
>
> There is no a lot of sense to keep historical dumps because the only
> "historical information" from such dumps would be a timestamp and,
> possibly, a different file format (it is XML now, it was SQL in the
> past). All relevant historical informations which are kept inside of
> the dumps are inside of the latest database dump.
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde