[Wikimedia-l] September 11 wiki

[Tim Starling]

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sep11wiki

I think it's disrespectful to solicit contributions towards a memorial
website, and then to fail to maintain that memorial website in a
searchable format.

Today, searching the web for phrases in contributed memorial pages
brings up only ancient, presumably unmaintained Wikipedia mirrors,
such as these:

http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/da/Daniel_Brandhorst
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Daniel_Brandhorst/

In time, those will disappear from the web, as all other copies have
done. Thus, relatives of the deceased will have no way to discover
that these pages ever existed.

In 2007, the September 11 wiki was moved to a non-Wikimedia site,
evidently hosted by an individual without the capacity to preserve
that content for posterity. It was offline after only 3 years.

The data is still on our servers. I propose bringing the wiki back up,
in read only mode, and leaving it like that either until such time as
there is interest from a non-profit or government organisation in
taking over the responsibility of indefinite hosting. It would only
take an hour or so of ops work. It could stay like that for decades
without needing any further maintenance.

-- Tim Starling