Your two rights on Wikipedia Options

[thekohser]

I've heard it said that users have two rights on Wikipedia:

1. The right to "fork" the database
2. The right to leave the project

So, I'm thinking about forking the English Wikipedia. How exactly does one go about doing that? I thought that the Wikimedia Foundation had given up about 18 months ago with trying to produce regularly-available data dumps of the entire project, presumably because their servers were choking on the process.

Is it now incumbent on a forker of the mother database (the "mother forker") to execute the entire process from "outside" Wikipedia?

And another question -- how might one fork the Simple English Wikipedia, which has a much more manageable 25,704 articles?

Greg

[gomi]

This is one of the big lies of Wikipedia -- that you can fork it. There have been successful backups during 2007 -- as recently as December, but they get removed as soon as they are complete. There is a very small window in which to pick one up. Wordbomb has some, but I think they are old.

[EternalIdealist]

The misconception that database dumps are somehow rare or difficult to come by is one of the most persistent falsehoods. People really should bother to Google. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

Wikimedia db dumps

Wikipedia's page about acquiring the db

[thekohser]

The misconception that database dumps are somehow rare or difficult to come by is one of the most persistent falsehoods. People really should bother to Google. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

Wikimedia db dumps

Wikipedia's page about acquiring the db

LOL. Try clicking the English Wikipedia HTML dump. (Doesn't work.)

Try grabbing the XML dump of just the most recent edited pages of the English Wikipedia. (Doesn't work.)

So, you were rolling your eyes, because...?

[Nathan]

The misconception that database dumps are somehow rare or difficult to come by is one of the most persistent falsehoods. People really should bother to Google. :rolleyes:

Wikimedia db dumps

Wikipedia's page about acquiring the db

LOL. Try clicking the English Wikipedia HTML dump. (Doesn't work.)

Try grabbing the XML dump of just the most recent edited pages of the English Wikipedia. (Doesn't work.)

So, you were rolling your eyes, because...?

There's a dump right there, though. oops, not what you want.