How to find old wikipedia dumps

Question

I need to access to very old wikipedia dumps (backups of Wikipedia) in french. I succeed in finding a 2010 backup from archive.org, and now i'm searching for 2006 or even before. I know that in the latest dumps there is all the data from previous ones, but I need to set up in my computer a version of Wikipedia as it was in for example 2006,2010,2012. A thing that is - I guess - impossible to do with the latest dumps.

Thank you very mutch for your help.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Wikimedia does not keep all historical dumps (with the few exceptions noted by others).

Given your use case, I highly recommend using the JWPL Wikipedia Revision Toolkit: https://dkpro.github.io/dkpro-jwpl/WikipediaRevisionToolkit/

Specifically, you'll likely appreciate the "Time Machine" package, which allows you to reconstruct the state of Wikipedia at some past date. https://dkpro.github.io/dkpro-jwpl/TimeMachine/

Though I haven't used that feature specifically, I've had great success using the Revision Toolkit for other purposes. The JWPL package contains other very useful tools as well.

Answer 2

The Wikimedia Foundation provides access to some old dumps on their website. Do note that some of them uses a different schema compared to the present-day Wikipedia, so you might need to modify your tools when working with them.

More archives are also available on Archive.org.

Answer 3

There appear to be static HTML dumps from November 2006, available here: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/

Also, if you get the full dump (with edit history), you could filter it to remove all revisions later than a certain date -- then you should be able to view it as of that date (aside from material later deleted, and so not in the dump).