Archive the ECMAScript wiki

[littledan]

Refiled from tc39/ecma262#1090

TC39 used a wiki for design docs and development through the ES6 era, before moving to GitHub. For a while, the ECMAScript wiki at http://wiki.ecmascript.org has been available just through Internet Archive. The wiki is very important for understanding the design decisions of the JavaScript language we have today. Is anyone interested in archiving it and placing it on GitHub?

[IgnoredAmbience]

Dave already appears to have archived it here: https://github.com/dherman/tc39-wiki-archive

Also searching through his repos there appear to be work in progress tc39 wiki that may be also worthwhile archiving, if the contents significantly differ: https://github.com/dherman/tc39-codex-wiki

[littledan]

Should we close this issue based on @dherman 's progress, or should we move that content here or continue the work somehow?

[IgnoredAmbience]

The tc39-wiki-archive repository seems to be highly incomplete (nothing but the frontpage and 2 deeper ones).
tc39-codex-wiki might have ported more information across, but I've not done any deeper research into whether it was a complete copy of the old wiki.

[littledan]

This seems pretty important to fix soon, so we are not relying exclusively on Internet Archive for so much important history. cc @keithamus @rkirsling

[IgnoredAmbience]

Memento may also be a useful tool for locating archived sites, it's reporting that the wiki homepage (and maybe more) was picked up by the Library of Congress' Web Archive. http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/

[IgnoredAmbience]

From a spot-check of https://github.com/dherman/tc39-codex-wiki, it appears the content mostly dates from 2012, and many wiki pages were significantly updated subsequently to this date.

For example, both these pages have far more content on the wiki version than the codex version:

• Template Strings codex, wiki
• Array Comprehensions codex, wiki

[allenwb]

That's a snapshot that @dherman took when he was exploring redoing TC39 web presence in 2012.

It was never used as the active TC39 wiki. ES6, etc. work continued using the original wiki.ecmascript.org until we had fully transitioned to github.

[littledan]

I heard a rumour that @tschneidereit had made a snapshot of the wiki at some point. Is this true?

[jmdyck]

Couldn't we just ask for a file system backup of wiki.ecmascript.org from before it went down? Who was in charge of the server?

[allenwb]

You should check with @dherman as he was was the interface to the host of wiki.ecmascript.org.

I believe that the actual server was provided by Jeff Dryer, a long ago TC39 participant. Jeff (or whomever) might still have filesystem backups. Dave should be able to get you connected.