We approached Wikipedia in 2012-2013 about using the extension, but the technical evaluation led to the decision not to deploy [1], even though the RFC response was positive [2]. In response to this, we totally rewrote the extension and released version 2.0 [3] last month. The new extension was also thoroughly tested for performance impact. A technical report [4] describes our design choices, testing results, and challenges with reconstructing pages.
We’ve also written about the functionality that Memento can bring to Wikipedia [5], and demonstrated it in use at WikiConference USA 2014 [6] [7]. Currently, for Memento users, we have a proxy that simulates Memento compliance for Wikipedia. A demonstration is here [8]. It is not nearly as powerful as the extension. It cannot render old templates, old images, but only redirects to the oldid page. It also cannot provide metadata for use by robots. We had to build exceptions into the Chrome Extension to deal with this [9]. We’ve expended a lot of effort to bring web time travel to the greater web, paying special attention to MediaWiki/Wikipedia. It would be nice if it could be seriously considered for cases where the functionality it provides is required. You mentioned that there are many users who wish to see the true earlier state of content. We’re looking for support from the community to make Memento in Wikipedia a reality. Do you know which others would be interested? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Memento [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34778 [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Memento [4] http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3876 [5] http://www.mementoweb.org/wikipedia/ [6] http://www.slideshare.net/shawnmjones/reconstructing-the-past-with-media-wiki-35333484 [7] http://www.slideshare.net/shawnmjones/using-the-memento-mediawiki-extension-to-avoid-spoilers-35333526 [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtZHKeFwjzk [9] http://bit.ly/memento-for-chrome Shawn M. Jones Graduate Research Assistant Department of Computer Science Old Dominion University Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Research group: http://ws-dl.blogspot.com Twitter: @shawnmjones On Jul 1, 2014, at 1:11 AM, Bináris <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: 2014-07-01 1:54 GMT+02:00 Shawn Jones <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: The Memento extension renders past versions of pages, including templates. Sounds well, but the problem is that many of these templates are deleted. I guess not Even Memento will show them. Will this extension be switched on for Wikipedia? There are many users, who wish to see the true earlier state of content (or other) pages when they look at page history, completely disregarding central notices. Would be great! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
