[Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Henning Schlottmann
<h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi Magnus,
>
> On 14.12.2010 22:35, Magnus Manske wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Henning Schlottmann
>> <h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> On 14.12.2010 16:54, Tim Starling wrote:
>>>> I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I
>>>> opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete
>>>> backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001!
>>>
>>> That's wonderful news. Is this for enWP only or were all languages in
>>> one database back then?
>>
>> There was only English back in the day...
>
> Not true. The first other languages were introduced on March 15 and
> could be part of this archive if the different Wikipedias were in one
> database under UseMod.

My earliest recorded entry in de.wikipedia dates September 2001 (and I
have a low two-digit user ID, which was created upon the switch to
MediaWiki), so there seem to be some versions missing indeed. Do you
know the oldest preserved esit on de.wp?

> Do you remember how this worked?

AFAIR, every language had its own UseMod setup. My import script only
took the last version; Brion later wrote one that filled in the
previous ones from the stored diffs.

Magnus