Dumps/History

(This page needs fact-checking!)

The first dumps of the projects that we still have lying around are from January 2001; Tim Starling turned them up during a perusal of the files on the old MediaWiki SourceForge site. At that time dumps consisted of tar-ing up the top level directory, as far as I can tell by looking at at the scripts from a January 2002 dump. This meant that you got automatically a copy of the images, the user pages, the current article versions, and all the scripts. This was when the projects were still using UseModWiki. The scripts from the Jan 2002 dump say "UseModWiki version 0.91 (February 12, 2001)".

Once MediaWiki became the platform, dumps were produced as sql dumps of the various tables for a given project. In March of 2003 the en wikipedia dump (enwiki-cur.sql.gz) was just about 700 megabytes. We even have a description of how you dumped projects then. Those original backup scripts are still around on our bastion host in 2012! (Curious? Go to /home/wikipedia/bin-old/ and look at backup-all and the other backup-* scripts.)

In mid 2005, with the adoption of MediaWiki 1.5, the storage format for text changed, so that plain sql dumps were no longer feasible. Brion Vibber put together a new python script using the MediaWiki export mechanisms to produce dumps. The first checkin I could find of WikiBackup.py is from January 2006.

... (to be continued)

For old development plans, see:

• 2009: Data_dump_redesign
• 2011: Dumps/Development 2011 and Dumps/Development status 2011