[Labs-l] Discussion needed: Technically feasible, legally okay... but want tools do we want?
Matthew Flaschen
mflaschen at wikimedia.org
Tue Oct 1 21:41:30 UTC 2013
On 10/01/2013 12:03 PM, Merlijn van Deen wrote:
> I may be mistaken, but as far as I know the only thing required by the
> CC-BY-SA is a list of authors, not what they changed nor when. It's a
> *choice* to make the full edit history, including full time information,
> available.
Yes, but this is a long-standing choice, made for various important reasons:
* Right to fork
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_fork#Forking_free_and_open_source_software);
this is a factor (among many others) ensuring the foundation stays
responsive the community. It's impossible to do a good fork without
complete dumps.
* Archival and backup purposes (anyone can take the dumps and put them
somewhere like archive.org for the unlikely event that the WMF goes
under/gets hacked, or just so people can look up the history in the future).
* Interesting use cases like offline Wikipedia readers, mashups, and
much more.
I don't think we should change the dumps, but if someone wanted to, it's
certainly out of scope of the Labs discussion list.
The above is my personal opinion; I'm not speaking as a WMF employee.
Matt Flaschen
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