[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia sites not easy to archive (Was Re: Knol is closing tomorrow )

[Anthony]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 May 2012 13:32, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>> Because they are XML dumps, mainly.  The data in the WMF database is
>> compressed in a format which can be easily randomly accessed.
>
> It's a dump.

Not really.  Yes, it's called that.  And historically, it was that,
but the XML "dumps" aren't really dumps at all.

> It's not supposed to be randomly accessed. We're talking
> about archives, not mirrors.

That's why I said they're semi-useless (i.e. half-useless), not useless.