Suggestion: provide older versions of slobs

[Adrian Dziubek]

Hello all,
I've been using Aard for a quite a long time. Thank you all for your contributions.

I observed that some of the resources used by Aard suffer from political editing and censorship. This is happening more frequently with time. Especially Wikipedia has become an arena of political conflict. This results in loss of quality and censorship on some pages.

I'm using a 2014 Wikipedia version and I'm reluctant to update. In hope that even older version could be available, I made a quick issue:
https://github.com/itkach/slob/issues/39

Igor pointed me to this group and also replied, that I could browse the history here:
https://github.com/itkach/slob/wiki/Dictionaries/_history
with a caveat that "of course old links are not expected to work forever and people tend to not keep old content around since it is costly".

This isn't very important to me and I'm not proficient with creating slobs. Perhaps somebody will find this idea intriguing and will provide instructions or files. Maybe archive.org has some content or Wikipedia history feature itself could be used.

One of the battles in the conflict as an example:
https://swprs.org/wikipedia-disinformation-operation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Policy_Research
--
Adrian

[MHBraun]

Wikipedia is changing all the time. The content is based on the people who take the time to put information into it. It has repeatedly been tested upon accuracy and all tests showed that it is at least as accurate as any other dictionary.

Of course this is a battlefield to claim the truth. Just all the argumentation if you want to change a false entry which is considered as a correct entry by the moderators. - I have been through this.

The content is dependent on the authors and as long as we are correcting false entries the accuracy remains high. Not ideal, not perfect but to the best knowledge. We still need to use our common sense to identify correct and incorrect information.

I am generating slob files. And I keep a rolling system where I keep the predecessor and the actual version. Anything older is not relevant to me anymore. I might even have some older *.slob versions, probably even *.aar versions, in some backup. If you want me to provide it to you, let me know the portal to upload it for you.

For the actual versions to download and to archive, as those will be the old versions of tomorrow, please download from 

http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/aarddict/

And do not forget to archive the reader of the files as well. The data without the reader is not accessible.