[Labs-l] Discussion needed: Technically feasible, legally okay... but want tools do we want?

[Matthew Flaschen]

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