[Wikitech-l] Loosing the history of our projects to bitrot. Was: Acquiring list of templates including external links

[Marc-Andre]

On 2016-08-01 12:21 PM, Gergo Tisza wrote:


the parser has changed over time and old templates
might not work anymo


Aaah.  Good point.  Also, the changes in extensions (or, indeed, what 
extensions are installed at all) might break attempts to parse the past, 
as it were.


You know, this is actually quite troublesome: as the platform evolves 
the older data becomes increasingly hard to use at all - making it 
effectively lost even if we kept the bits around.  This is a rather 
widespread issue in computing as a rule; but I now find myself 
distressed at its unavoidable effect on what we've always intended to be 
a permanent contribution to humanity.


We need to find a long-term view to a solution.  I don't mean just 
keeping old versions of the software around - that would be of limited 
help.  It's be an interesting nightmare to try to run early versions of 
phase3 nowadays, and probably require managing to make a very very old 
distro work and finding the right versions of an ancient apache and 
PHP.  Even *building* those might end up being a challenge... when is 
the last time you saw a working egcs install? I shudder how 
nigh-impossible the task might be 100 years from now.


Is there something we can do to make the passage of years hurt less?  
Should we be laying groundwork now to prevent issues decades away?


At the very least, I think those questions are worth asking.

-- Coren / Marc


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Acquiring list of templates including external links

[Marc-Andre]

On 2016-07-31 10:53 AM, Takashi OTA wrote:


When you want to check increase/decrease of linked domains in chronological
order through edit history


This is actually a harder problem that it seems, even at first glance: 
if you want to examine the links over time then, when you are looking at 
an old revision of an article, you have to contrive to expand the 
templates /as they existed at that time/ and not those that exist /now/ 
as the Mediawiki engine would do.


Clearly, all the data to do so is there in the database - and I seem to 
recall that there exists an extension that will allow you to use the 
parser in that way - but the Foundation projects do not have such an 
extension installed and cannot be convinced to render a page for you 
that would accurately show what ELs it might have had at a given date.


-- Coren / Marc


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