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nemobis edited this page Apr 15, 2020 · 7 revisions

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We archive wikis, from Wikipedia to tiniest wikis

WikiTeam software is a set of tools for archiving wikis. They work on MediaWiki wikis, but we want to expand to other wiki engines. As of 2020, WikiTeam has preserved more than 30,000 stand-alone wikis, several WikiFarms carrying hundreds of thousands of wikis, regular Wikipedia dumps and dozens of TB of Wikimedia Commons images.

There are thousands of wikis in the Internet. Everyday some of them are no longer publicly available and, due to lack of backups, lost forever. Millions of people download tons of media files (movies, music, books, etc) from the Internet, implementing a kind of distributed backup. Wikis, most of them under free licenses, disappear from time to time because nobody grabbed a copy of them. That is a shame that we would like to solve.

WikiTeam is the Archive Team subcommittee on wikis. It was founded and originally developed by Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada, a Wikipedia veteran editor and amateur archivist. Many people have help sending suggestions, reporting bugs, writing documentation, providing help in the mailing list and making wiki backups. Thanks to all, especially to: Federico Leva, Alex Buie, Scott Boyd, Hydriz, Platonides, Ian !McEwen and Mike Dupont.

Current events

The last news (follow us on Twitter too!):

  • 2020-02-26: The MediaWiki dumps in the WikiTeam collection at Internet Archive have passed the 30,000 wikis milestone. The entire collection now has over 260,000 items.
  • 2020-02-14: We published a complete dump of Wikia wikis' history, the first ever, thanks to the new version of dumpgenerator (0.4.0-alpha). It's over 5 TB of XML (when uncompressed).
  • 2014-02-14: Today, WikiTeam collection at Internet Archive has surpassed the 10,000 wikis milestone. We love wikis. Happy Valentine's Day!
  • 2013-10-14: WikiTeam has just finished archiving all Wikimedia Commons files up to 2012 on the Internet Archive. About 24 TB of content.
  • 2013-03-17: Niklas Laxström has kindly provided a dump of translatewiki.net (13th biggest wiki by number of pages).
  • 2013-01-27: Wikia wikis dumps archived. About 34,000 wikis have dumps, one tenth of existing Wikia wikis. Wikia has now restricted dump requests to "autoconfirmed" users.
See also our older news. For a more detailed action log, see our commit history.

What can you do?

You can do a lot of things:

Research

Are you a researcher? If you have conducted any research about wikis using our software or the backups we made available, we would be glad to hear from your experience.

WikiTeam in the news, blogs, etc

License

This project contains a lot of material. Be careful with the licenses.

Contact

If you want to contact with the WikiTeam community, you can do it:

  • For bug reports, new features requests, notices about new wikis to backup, visit our issues tracker.
  • General discussion about WikiTeam tools and help for new users, visit our mailing list
  • Developers discussion about bugs, patches, features, visit the developers' mailing list
  • There is a social IRC channel in Efnet: irc://efnet/wikiteam (webchat access)