[Wikipedia-l] History of pages, author issues.

[Jimmy Wales]

Magnus Manske wrote:
> * As Wikipedia articles have no author, there's no authorship.

Well, there was a good bit of useful data there.  There is authorship in some
sense, and we do like to keep the history.

> * AFAIK, the UseModWiki only stored the changes of the last two weeks (or
> something like that).

It was previously two weeks, but I extended it, I forget how long, but our
intention is to keep the history more or less permanently, subject to disk
space constraints.  (But disk space is cheap.)

> * AFAIK, there will be "old.wikipedia.com", with a patched UseModWiki that
> doesn't allow to edit/save articles, only view them, with the contents from
> before the switch.

That's right.  But we should still see about getting the old history into the new
database if it isn't impossible.

> * The reason why I didn't convert the article history as well as the
> "current" versions is simply that I didn't figure out how to read the
> UseModWiki history format. I asked several times, even on the 'pedia, for
> help, but...

*nod*  I don't know the answer to this.  I've tried it myself and did not succeed.

Maybe Clifford Adams could help us?