[Foundation-l] dumps

Brian Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu
Wed Feb 25 23:33:19 UTC 2009


Ahh ok. Anyone who wants to do processing on the full history (and there are
a lot of these people who exist!) by definition *has* to be willing to throw
some money at it. It simply doesn't fit on commercial drives. In fact, it
would hardly fit on either of the two raid clusters I have access to. Making
it available on Amazon means that, for a fair market rate, you don't have to
download or uncompress the data. You can just start your data crunching. I
can only speak for academics but there is generally funding available for
Amazon EC2 etc... for specific projects. Professors are even known to pay
for a fixed amount of processing for ambitious student projects, and these
kinds of earmarks are easily fit into grants.

The claim that there is no demand for having it on amazon is some kind of
fallacy that I don't know the name for. Its never been available on Amazon,
how could there be demand? Heck, it hasn't been available for several years
in the first place so how could there be a demand for it? People *just want
the data*.  Many people would be willing to pay a fee. Thus, for an
extremely reasonable price they can now create a new amazon disk image and
download it to their own raid cluster if they want. The foundation doesn't
have to foot the bill. Or they can find funding for their specific project,
or whatever.

I have a rare copy of the last available full text dump. Perhaps I should
initiate the process myself.


On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/2/25 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> > What has led you to believe there is no demand for a full dump of the
> > english wikipedia?
>
> He didn't say there was no demand, he said there was no demand for
> having it on Amazon.
>
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