[Foundation-l] Wikimedia mirrors

[Aude]

On Sep 16, 2010, at 6:44 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Aude <aude.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Surely there are third parties with such experience and interested in
>> this. [...] Surely google has or should have copy?
>
> It would be interesting to know what Google has. I recently began a
> new article and was stunned to see that Google had indexed, given a
> high ranking to, and (IIRC) had a cache of the article within the day.

I see new articles & edits appear in Google searches almost immediately.

>
> I'm not technical, so I speak from ignorance, but I imagine they
> wouldn't have article histories.

Probably.  If i remember correctly, WMF gets some modest income from  
google (& others?) for providing priority feeds of recent changes (as  
feeds or through API) whereas normal users have API limits.  Please  
clarify if someone knows better!

>
> The notion that Wikipedia was currently vulnerable to data loss had
> honestly never occurred to me; I thought that the reference sites that
> use our content meant that back-ups are ubiquitous. You've all given
> me the fear.

I don't fear anything bad but concerned.

But suppose (very very very unlikely) there was some massive scandal  
and fundraising dried up or some massive lawsuit or other scenario and  
WMF ceased to exist? Not impossible? (what's the reserve? How long can  
wmf survive if fundraising dried up today?)

Distributed mirrors and database dumps are in my view fundamental top  
priority, providing peace of mind, right along w/ keeping servers  
running. All the other WMF staff programs (awesome that they are!) are  
far secondary

Would also be cool to see more innovative uses of wikipedia content,  
made possible with good dumps

@aude


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