Dear all,

I am happy to announce that a Memento time travel extension for MediaWiki is 
now available for testing and feedback. The extension can be downloaded via [1] 
and requires MediaWiki version 1.21.1+. A demonstration wiki equipped with the 
Memento extension is available [2].

The extension is fully compliant with the Memento specification [3] that will 
soon be released as an RFC.  This new extension is the result of a significant 
re-engineering effort guided by feedback received from Wikipedia experts to a 
previous version [4]. The effort is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation and is a collaboration between Old Dominion University and the Los 
Alamos National Laboratory. 

The Memento protocol extends HTTP with content negotiation in the datetime 
dimension. The document [5] is helpful to get an insight in the added value 
that support for the protocol can bring to MediaWiki platforms. The 1-minute 
screencam [6] and the 10-minute screencam [7] illustrate Memento at work in the 
Web at large. The latter pays significant attention to temporal navigation in 
Wikipedia, and hence illustrates that the Memento Team considers time travel in 
MediaWiki platforms a major use case of the protocol. 

The Memento protocol is not yet natively supported by browsers but a fully 
functional extension for Chrome is available [8]. The Memento Team hopes that 
adoption by MediaWiki platforms, in addition to the existing adoption by major 
web archives [9] and support by the International Internet Preservation 
Consortium [10], may lead browser manufacturers to consider implementation. 

The Memento team is eager to get feedback to the extension in order to guide 
its further development to a state where it fully meet the needs of the 
MediaWiki community. A separate mail will list some issues that came up during 
the development process to which explicit feedback is solicited. But feedback 
beyond those issues is very welcome and hopefully some experienced extension 
developers will find the time to scrutinize the code base and help us to 
improve it.

Very much looking forward to your feedback.

Herbert Van de Sompel on behalf of the Memento Team
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento
[2] http://ws-dl-05.cs.odu.edu/demo-302-recommended-relations/
[3] http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ID/
[4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34778
[5] http://www.mementoweb.org/wikipedia/
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_70lQPOOIg
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtZHKeFwjzk
[8] http://bit.ly/memento-for-chrome
[9] http://mementoweb.org/depot/
[10] http://netpreserve.org


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