Memento Depot - Wikipedia Memento Proxy Support

Last updated: January 19, 2015

All language versions of WikiPedia are accessible via the Memento "Time Travel for the Web" protocol through a 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 extension for MediaWiki or the Memento Headers extension for MediaWiki. For example, the COPTR wiki natively supports Memento.

The proxy solution for WikiPedia 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 English Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ as an example. And let's take an Original Resource (current version of an article), namely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving. The resources that are relevant for the Memento protocol are:

• TimeGate: http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/wikipedia/timegate/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving
• Memento: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_archiving&oldid=526371727 ; etc.
• TimeMap: http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/wikipedia/timemap/link/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving

When requesting the URI of the current version of a Wikipedia article, the response does not provide the Link header with a "timegate" link that points at the TimeGate for the requested article.