[Foundation-l] Wikimedia mirrors

[emijrp]

I want to paste a paragraph by Richard Stallman from his *The Free Universal
Encyclopedia and Learning Resource*[1]. For curious people and for adding
more useful ideas to this thread. I want you see this 'movement of backup
all!' only a wish of protecting this huge wiki treasure that we are writing
since 2001.

*Permit mirror sites.*

When information is available on the web only at one site, its availability
is vulnerable. A local problem—a computer crash, an earthquake or flood, a
budget cut, a change in policy of the school administration—could cut off
access for everyone forever. To guard against loss of the encyclopedia's
material, we should make sure that every piece of the encyclopedia is
available from many sites on the Internet, and that new copies can be put up
if some disappear.

There is no need to set up an organization or a bureaucracy to do this,
because Internet users like to set up “mirror sites” which hold duplicate
copies of interesting web pages. What we must do in advance is ensure that
this is legally permitted.

Therefore, each encyclopedia article and each course should explicitly grant
irrevocable permission for anyone to make verbatim copies available on
mirror sites. This permission should be one of the basic stated principles
of the free encyclopedia.

Some day there may be systematic efforts to ensure that each article and
course is replicated in many copies—perhaps at least once on each of the six
inhabited continents. This would be a natural extension of the mission of
archiving that libraries undertake today. But it would be premature to make
formal plans for this now. It is sufficient for now to resolve to make sure
people have permission to do this mirroring when they get around to it.
Regards,
emijrp

[1] http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html

2010/9/16 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>

> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:16 PM, George Herbert
> <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Disaster Recovery is not something the Foundation should attempt to
> > crowdsource.
>
> IIRC, it Greg Maxwell who had (some of?) the images that the
> Foundation lost when a bug was rolled into production.
>
> It is lovely that the Foundation is improving their disaster
> preparedness, however the community should not depend on the
> Foundation for this.  For all we know, it could be the Foundation
> which becomes the disaster we never planned for.
>
> > I recommend it be left to professionals whose job it is
> > and who have prior experience in the field.  If you ...
>
> That you offering to help the community, yea? ;-)
>
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:17 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> > John Vandenberg wrote:
> >> The key would be to allow the mirrors to delete their mirror when they
> >> need to use their excess storage capability.  If they let us know in
> >> advance that they are reclaiming the space, another organisation with
> >> excess storage capability can take over.
> >
> > Surely I don't need to be the one to point out that another huge issue
> with
> > mirrors is that they often replicate bad information ("John Doe is a
> > rapist", etc.). The mirrors you all are talking about sound like they'd
> > update fairly regularly. Some of the current (unofficial) mirrors,
> however,
> > have a horrible tendency to import once and then linger forever.
>
> I'm not so interested in these mirrors putting the data into a
> database and publishing it onto the web.
> At present I would be more interested in the dumps (.7z) being
> systematically mirrored, with a commitment to make them available if
> the shit ever hit the fan.
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
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