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MediaWiki System
Proxy Memento Support

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This document provides information about MediaWiki systems that are Memento compatible via a proxy solution.

Questions and comments are welcome on memento-dev@googlegroups.com.

MediaWiki Systems with Proxy Memento Support

Archive Content

WikiPedia as well as MediaWiki wikis operated on the Wikia platform are accessible via the Memento "Time Travel for the Web" protocol through a by proxy solution. Because of the proxy nature of the Memento support, responses are typically slower than they would be with native Memento support. MediaWiki systems can be made Memento compliant by installing the Memento MediaWiki plugin. For example, the DCMI wiki at http://wiki.dublincore.org natively supports Memento, as described here.

Nevertheless, the proxy solution for WikiPedia and Wikia wikis provides support for Memento's datetime negotiation to access a version of a web resource as it existed at a specific moment in time. Check out the brief introduction to Memento if you are not familiar with it.

Let's take the wiki http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/ operated by Wikia as an example. And let's take an Original Resource (current version) on that wiki, namely http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Heracross. The resources that are relevant for the Memento protocol are:
Further information:
  • The aforementioned patterns also apply to the WikiPedia proxy solution. Just replace /wikia/ by /wiki/ in the URIs for TimeGates, TimeMaps, and TimeBundles. Memento URIs in WikiPedia will be of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paris&oldid=482943594 for the Original Resource http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris.
  • The TimeBundle is a more expressive, RDF-based, version of the TimeMap. One major distinction is that the TimeBundle expresses the interval of temporal validity of a Memento, i.e. the time period in which the Memento was the current version of the Original Resource.

Integration with the Original Dataset

When requesting the URI of a wiki article, these wikis that are made Memento compliant by proxy do not provide a Link header with a "timegate" link that points at the TimeGate for the requested article.