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Thomas Dalton wrote:
2008/12/12 lamiataspaska@mail.bg:
I was wondering if there is a way to download an early English Wikipedia database xml dump (something in the first month or so). Curently, at download.wikimedia.org there are only a few recent dumps, and none of them are complete.
You may be interested in http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage
For background -- nostalgia.wikipedia.org is a read-only copy built from the earliest English Wikipedia backup I could find, from December 20, 2001.
I converted it to modern MediaWiki and put it up in 2005 for the 4th anniversary of Wikipedia's opening.
It's included in our regular XML data dumps, so you can pull a modern XML-style dump right here:
http://download.wikimedia.org/nostalgiawiki/20081126/nostalgiawiki-20081126-...
Revisions from 2005 are applications of automated format conversions to fix CamelCase links etc.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any earlier Wikipedia backups still in existence; some revisions from the first few months won't be included in this dump (or in live Wikipedia) because UseModWiki, the software we originally ran on, came configured by default to delete old revisions after two weeks. :(
Some older revisions *might* still exist in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/) but we've never done a systematic check...
- -- brion