On Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:47:45 -0800 Brion VIBBER <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote: I agree this is important. It will be sad if we have other general wikis where users are submitting their edits, which will get lost when the administrator updates from the main wiki. I suspect Wiki mirrors will work well if the resources needed to mirror the database file are made fewer. Although I don't intend to run a mirror, I have gone through the database creation steps to learn more about MySQL and to consider creating a PERL script to make an HTML tree, which shouldn't be too difficult. Currently, each time someone wishes to update their version of the mirror, they need to download a 80Mb file, unzip it to 412 Mb then run a database create (which took me 6 hours with a 10,000 rpm drive). (If I had 1Gb memory, this would be brought down to 40 min.) By making the wiki database .MYI, .MYD and .frm files available by anonymous rsync, mirrors can sync their database to the wiki database in minutes, with relatively little data transfer (Rsync only sends the differences between the local and remote copy of the file over the network). With such a system, I can imagine lots of databased wiki mirrors pointing their edits back to the main wiki. The same thing would work just as well, and be easier to implement, using rsync on an HTML tree image of Wiki. This surprises me. I would think it closer to 400Mb. The current article database seems mostly plain text and weighs in at 404Mb without revision histories. I have viewed the database with Hexedit and less than 10% is non-text. The KDE Konqueror web browser can navigate and open files in a .tgz archive, but this would only be a medium-term partial solution.

Derek Ross wrote: September 20, to judge by its Recentchanges. Other notes: Their site claims to "already have 0 articles"! Randompage always gives [[Main Page]] there. Watchlinks doesn't seem to work on their site. Since [[Main Page]] is a protected page on the real Wikipedia, I can't edit theirs to indicate that theirs is inactive and point people to our Wikipedia, even though I'm a sysop. -- Toby