Something most people avoid, even if they know better. The practice of periodically creating a mirror of important data and storing it separate from the main storage, allowing a system to recover from the loss of one or more storage locations.
The contents of this wiki is backed up periodically. All page changes are logged and saved. So while it's trivial to mess up this public wiki, it's also trivial to restore it. In most cases, the regulars here tend to remove all traces of people deliberately messing up the wiki. In some cases, we leave it and even discuss it (as in [L1 ]).
All in all, reason and good taste appear to prevail. So these backups are there mostly as insurance. Wiki's are a medium for optimists :) -jcw
LV I love jcw's comment - stores along the street have glass windows - one could throw a brick through them, but in general they don't. I saw, for that matter, people could (and occasionally do) write on the windows, etc. of stores, houses, etc. But in general, the population doesn't.
KBK - Recently I heard from a gentleman in Norway (Erik Taraldsen - eriktar at online dot no) warning me of a "security flaw" in the Wiki, after he accidentally discovered that he could edit a page without an account and password. I mailed back to him that the Wiki is supposed to be that way. His reply is worth quoting:
After reading more on mini.net I am really fascinated! How that
kind of extreme openness can work in a often hostile environment
like the internet is beyond me.
Thank you for the invitation into the Tcl community. I'll have
a look at the language, and see if it is the right tool for
this job.2002-06-19: FWIW, I've made changes so the edit page does not get indexed in Google and other indexes anymore (it may take a month to work its way through what is already indexed). It occurred to me that because the wiki is no longer blocking indexing, all pages are now in google, including the "edit this page" ones. Accidental jumps to the edit page may well be the main reason why we see more junk these days - i.e. not vandalism but someone trying to find a way out of the "edit" form :) -jcw Prudent tweak, says this non-jcw Wiki contributor.