Last modified: 2013-06-12 06:36:59 UTC
Most edits from February 2002 onwards have survived intact in the Wikipedia database, but some have not, mostly due to deletion-related accidents. I've compiled a list of these at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Graham87/Page_history_observations I'd like to be able to use the newly released historical database dumps to re-add some of these missing edits. Ideally, these database dumps should be placed on read-only wikis, where any admin can use Special:Import to retrieve the necessary edits like the Nostalgia Wikipedia (see bug 20280).
On my todo list is to find all broken revisions on all projects and wade through the dumps to see what's recoverable. It's pretty far down on the list though :-(
(In reply to comment #0) > I'd like to be able to use the newly released historical database dumps to > re-add some of these missing edits. Ideally, these database dumps should be > placed on read-only wikis, where any admin can use Special:Import to retrieve > the necessary edits like the Nostalgia Wikipedia (see bug 20280). Can't you "just" check them by hand and use Special:Import with importupload right (see [[m:Importer]])? If the XML is too big you could also import it on some test wiki, delete the pages you don't need, re-export all the rest and import the XML.
Ah, remember that [[m:NWI]] are masters of such XML dumps jobs. ;-)
(In reply to comment #2) > > Can't you "just" check them by hand and use Special:Import with importupload > right (see [[m:Importer]])? > If the XML is too big you could also import it on some test wiki, delete the > pages you don't need, re-export all the rest and import the XML. Hmmm, interesting idea (especially getting the help of the small-wiki importers from comment 3!). It's just that the dumps I'm most interested in (from May 2003 and 2002) aren't in XML format at all ... they're in the format of the old versions of MediaWiki and UseModWiki. They do have a warning on them that they shouldn't be wholesale dumped into the latest version of MediaWiki, after all ...
Hm, I'm not sure I understand what dumps you're talking about then: do you mean the content Tim Starling recovered from the diff txt files of UseModWiki, and which Reagle reworked a bit? http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/10k-redux.html That may be tricky indeed. :/
Yes, it would be nice to restore the dumps from August 2001 that Tim Starling recovered, but for the purposes of this bug I'm specifically talking about these dumps: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/
I've finally bitten the bullet and imported the January 2003 dump to a local copy of MediaWiki (not an easy task for someone with almost no MySQL experience!) I did so with the help of MediaWiki 1.3 (using a skeleton database) and MediaWiki 1.5 (using its updater). I have requested import rights on Meta, so I can import some of the needed revisions, at Steward Requests/Permissions. My request is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward_requests/Permissions#Miscellaneous_requests
