John Elliot (2011-08-12 13:36): > [...] > The thing about me, is that there can be hundreds of thousands of people > like me, and when you add up all our contributions, you have a > formidable force. I can't host Wikipedia, but there could be facilities > in place for me to be able to easily mirror the parts of it that are > relevant to me. For instance, on my Network administration page, I have > a number of links to other sites, several of which are links to Wikipedia: > > http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Network_administration#Links > > Links such as: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion > > Now by rights there could be a registry in my MediaWiki installation > that recorded en.wikipedia.org as being another wiki with a particular > content distribution policy, such as a policy permitting local > mirroring. MediaWiki, when it noticed that I had linked to such a > facility, could replace the link, changing it to a link on my local > system, e.g. > > http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Wikepedia:Subversion > > ... > >
That's a very interesting idea... And it should be really hard to do. Let's say you linked the Subversion article and you've set up that the address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1 To be hosted as: http://www.progclub.org/wiki/en-wiki:... Now each time your user clicks on a link everything gets registered in your installation as "to be downloaded" and upon given number of clicks and/or given number of resources and/or at given time to be downloaded to your site. The tricky part would be that you not only need the article itself, but also it's templates and that can be quite a lot with first articles you get. Further more this extension would probably need to allow users to opt-out of downloading images and maybe instead of getting wikicode just host rendered HTML so that you don't really need to host templates. And speaking of images - the problem with any of the solutions is - who would really want to spend money to host all this data? There were times when Wikipedia had many hold ups, but now I feel there are more chances that your own server would choke on the data rather then Wikipedia servers. Maybe ads added to self hosted articles would be worth it, but I kinda doubt anyone would want to host images unless they had to. BTW. I think a dynamic fork was already made by France Telecom. They fork Polish Wikipedia and update articles in a matter of minutes (or at least they did last time I've checked - they even hosted talk pages so it was easy to test). You can see the fork here: http://wikipedia.wp.pl/ Note that they don't host images though they host image pages. Regards, Nux. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
