ArchivesWiki:About

ArchivesWiki is a collaborative online repository for the material (and descriptions of the material) held in Australian archives of all sorts (including digital-only). It is managed by the non-profit ArchivesWiki Inc.

To create an account, you'll need to know the code word: 'archives' (this is a slight attempt to stop spammers). You can also join the association by subscribing to the mailing list.

We use the Genealogy extension here. If you encounter any bugs with it, or wish to suggest new features, please do so on Wikimedia Phabricator.

ArchivesWiki elsewhere

• This wiki is registered on WikiApiary (where you can also see what other archives- or genealogy-oriented wikis there are in the world).
• Data dumps are uploaded to the Internet Archive (see below), so no one need be (too) worried about everything disappearing one day.

Mailing list

Members can join our mailing list at https://groups.io/g/archiveswiki or via the form in the sidebar here.

Data dumps and backups

We upload archival dumps of ArchivesWiki the Internet Archive. These dumps contain:

• an XML dump of all revisions of all pages (named archiveswiki_pages.zip)
• a zipfile of the images/ directory (named archiveswiki_images.zip, and excluding deleted images), produced with the following commands:

  cd /var/www/images/
  zip --recurse-paths --exclude './thumb/*' --exclude './deleted/*' --exclude './temp/*' '/var/backups/archiveswiki/archiveswiki_images.zip' .
  

These should be sufficient to restore the site, with only the loss of all user account data (passwords, email addresses, preferences etc.). We also have secure offline backups of all site data (not publicly accessible).

Available dumps (in reverse chronological order):

1. 2021-11-20: https://archive.org/details/ArchivesWiki20211120
2. 2018-09-02: https://archive.org/details/ArchivesWiki20180902
3. 2017-08-23: https://archive.org/details/ArchivesWiki20170823
4. 2014-03-01: https://archive.org/details/wiki-archivesorgau (old site; discontinued)

The private sites that live alongside ArchivesWiki are backed up in similar way, and regular dumps are distributed on Blu-Ray discs to relevant stakeholders.