[Foundation-l] Dumps mirroring (was: Request: WMF commitment as a long term cultural archive?)

[Strainu]

2011/9/21 emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com>:
> Hi all;
>
> Just like the scripts to preserve wikis[1], I'm working in a new script to
> download all Wikimedia Commons images packed by day. But I have limited
> spare time. Sad that volunteers have to do this without any help from
> Wikimedia Foundation.
>
> I started too an effort in meta: (with low activity) to mirror XML dumps.[2]
> If you know about universities or research groups which works with
> Wiki[pm]edia XML dumps, they would be a possible successful target to mirror
> them.
>
> If you want to download the texts into your PC, you only need 100GB free and
> to run this Python script.[3]
>
> I heard that Internet Archive saves XML dumps quarterly or so, but no
> official announcement. Also, I heard about Library of Congress wanting to
> mirror the dumps, but not news since a long time.
>
> L'Encyclopédie has an "uptime"[4] of 260 years[5] and growing. Will
> Wiki[pm]edia projects reach that?
>
> Regards,
> emijrp
>
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/
> [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_XML_dumps
> [3]
> http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/source/browse/trunk/wikipediadownloader.py
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime
> [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die
>
>

Hi emirjrp,

I can understand why you would prefer to have "full mirrors" of the
dumps, but let's face it, 10TB is not (yet) something that most
companies/universities can easily spare. Also, most people only work
on 1-5 versions of Wikipedia, the rest is just overhead to them.

My suggestion would be to accept mirrors of a single language and have
a smart interface at dumps.wikimedia.org that redirects requests to
the location that is the best match for the user. This system is used
by some Linux distributions (see download.opensuse.org for instance)
with great success.

Regards,
   Strainu