Stack Exchange
Revision as of 22:35, 25 December 2024 by JustAnotherArchivist (talk | contribs) (Add a section about licence issues, update archival status, dump list link)
| Stack Exchange | |
| |
| |
| URL | https://stackexchange.com/ and many more |
| Status | Online! |
| Archiving status | Saved by itself (until 2024) Unknown (since 2024) |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #stackunderflow (on hackint) |
StackExchange is the biggest Q&A network of the 2010s. The software is proprietary (although there are ports like AskBot), and the content is freely licensed (CC-BY-SA).
- Dumps were published every few months at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- These dumps were briefly discontinued some time after 2023-03[1][2][3], but were resumed after pressure from various sources on 2023-06-14[4].
- On 2024-07-12, it was announced[5] that these dumps would no longer be publicly accessible on archive.org. Instead, they will now be available for download on the settings page after logging in. Additionally, users must agree to new terms before being permitted to download the dumps:
"I understand that this file is being provided to me for my own use and for projects that do not include training a large language model (LLM), and that should I distribute this file for the purpose of LLM training, Stack Overflow reserves the right to decline to allow me access to future downloads of this data dump."
- An unofficial list of all available dumps can be found here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-exchange-data-dump-releases
- http://www.stackprinter.com/deleted archives deleted questions
ZIM format:
- https://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/
- https://archive.org/search.php?query=stackoverflow.com%20zim
Very inactive questions may be deleted from the site. For example, this question about Internet Explorer 6 was deleted in April or May 2022.[6]
Licence issues
User content on Stack Exchange is freely licensed, but there have been several actions by Stack Exchange, Inc. over the years that make the details very questionable:
- In 2015, they proposed changing the licence of code snippets from CC BY-SA to MIT on 2016-02-01.[7] In response to community backlash over the many legal and practical issues this would cause, the plans were postponed by a month and altered to require attribution, then later postponed indefinitely.[8]
- In 2019 and without prior warning, Stack Exchange, Inc. announced that all content submitted from then on would be under the CC BY-SA 4.0 International licence rater than the CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported licence used until that point.[9] The prevailing opinion expressed in comments is that this move cannot be legally executed for past content because the right to relicense content remains with the author(s). Therefore, older content remains under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, although the site makes no attempt to clarify which licence applies to a particular piece of content, and newer edits to older content are still unaccounted for.
- In 2024, the licence of data dumps was changed to exclude commercial use, distribution, and LLM training.[5] Such restrictions are not compatible with CC BY-SA. Note also that the announcement refers to CC BY-SA 3.0, despite the (legally questionable) change to CC BY-SA 4.0 several years prior.
- In 2024, Stack Exchange, Inc. removed (or possibly suspended or similar) the account of Luigi Mangione, effectively removing attribution of his content, which would be a violation of the licence (unless it was requested by Luigi).[10] It is unknown how many times this had happened before.
References
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-data-dump-is-missing
- ↑ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/424299/stack-overflow-is-no-longer-providing-creative-commons-data-dumps
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/388551/is-se-going-to-be-selling-our-content-for-ai-model-training-and-what-exactly
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390023
- ↑ http://archive.today/2022.05.14-194521/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nsuiKJiaob0J:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20916831/navbar-and-iframe-filling-whole-page-internet-explorer-6+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-b-d
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]
- ↑ https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/405208/removing-attribution-because-someone-was-charged-but-not-convicted-with-a-crime[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]