[Wikimedia-l] September 11 wiki

[MZMcBride]

Tim Starling wrote:
>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.

I think there's general agreement that setting up this wiki was a mistake.
This isn't said out of callousness or indifference, it's just the
historical reality. Wikipedia was only eight months old when these attacks
took place. No subsequent major world event (e.g., the 2004 Indian Ocean
earthquake and tsunami) has had its own Wikimedia memorial wiki
established and it's very unlikely that we would ever set up another.

>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.

We provide a dump of the September 11 wiki's contents here:
<http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backups-of-old-wikis.html>. Memorial sites,
while depressing and touching, are completely outside the scope of
Wikimedia's mission. I don't believe Wikimedia has an obligation, moral
or otherwise, to host this content in an Internet searchable format in
perpetuity. Anyone, including non-profits and government organizations,
can use the dump we provide as they see fit. Deciding to host this site
again would be a mistake and one that we happen to have already made once.

MZMcBride