TLDR: I seek fellow developers with whom to collaborate on creating the
largest and most inclusive wiki in the world, Inclupedia.
http://meta.inclumedia.org/wiki/Inclupedia
Inclupedia is a project to make available, on an
OpenEdit<http://wikiindex.org/Category:OpenEdit>wikit;wiki, pages deleted
from Wikipedia for notability reasons, as well as
articles created from scratch on Inclupedia. Thus, it will combine elements
of Deletionpedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionpedia> and
Wikinfo<http://wikiindex.org/Wikinfo>as well as the various Wikipedia
mirrors <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks>. It
will be, in other words, a supplement to, and an up-to-date mirror of,
Wikipedia content.
Inclupedia seeks to accomplish the entire
inclusionist<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_…
through technical means, rather than through a political solution
that would require persuading deletionists and moderates to change their
wiki-philosophies. Inclupedia will have no notability requirements for
articles, and will let people post (almost) whatever they want in
userspace. It will also, however, learn from the failures of the various
Wikipedia forks that could not sustain much activity because they had no
way of becoming a comprehensive encyclopedia without duplicating
Wikipedians' labor.
Complete, seamless, and continuous integration with Wikipedia is required.
That is what will enable Inclupedia to be different from those ill-fated
aspirants to the throne whose abandoned, rotting carcasses now litter the
wikisphere. Inclupedia aspires to be the largest and most inclusive wiki in
the world, since the set of Inclupedia pages (and revisions) will always be
a superset <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/superset> of the set of
Wikipedia pages (and revisions).
People sometimes ask, "Hasn't this already been done?" It would seem that
it hasn't, which is why so much of the implementing code has to be designed
and developed rather than borrowed or reverse-engineered. In some ways, the
closest project to this one may have been been the various proprietary
sites that used the Wikimedia update feed
service<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_update_feed_service>…
stay continuously up-to-date with Wikipedia, but to my knowledge none
of
them used MediaWiki as their engine, and their inner workings are a
mystery. Those also tended to be read-only rather than mass collaborative
sites.
The core of what needs to be done is (1) developing a bot(s) to pull
post-dump data from Wikipedia and push it to Inclupedia, (2) developing
capability to merge received data into Inclupedia without losing any data
or suffering inconsistencies, e.g. resulting from collisions with existing
content (as might happen, e.g. in mirrored page moves involving
destinations that already exist on Inclupedia), and (3) developing all the
other capabilities involved in running a site that's both a mirror and a
supplement, e.g. locking mirrored pages from editing by Inclupedians
(unless there will be forking/overriding capability).
I can't exactly post a bug to MediaZilla saying "Create Inclupedia" and
then have a bunch of different bugs it depends on, because non-WMF projects
are beyond the scope of MediaZilla. Some bugs (e.g. bug
59618<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59618>)
concerning Inclupedia-reliant functionality are already in MediaZilla, but
there will inevitably arise completely Inclupedia-specific matters that
need to be dealt with in a different venue. Presumably, it'll be necessary
to create a whole new infrastructure of bug reporting, mailing lists, IRC
channels, etc. But, I want to get it right from the beginning, since this
is an opportunity to start from scratch (e.g. maybe there is a better code
review tool than Gerrit?) I have created Meta-Inclu as a venue for project
coordination.
Mostly, I would like help with design decisions, code review, etc. It's
such a big project, it seems almost overwhelming to contemplate doing
singlehandedly, but it's probably doable if there are a few people involved
who can bounce ideas off one another, provide moral support, etc. So, if
you are interested, feel free to email back or create an account at
Meta-Inclu, and we can begin discussing the details of implementation.
http://meta.inclumedia.org/
If there were to be insufficient volunteer support for implementing this
wiki, then the next step might be to try to get funding to pay developers.
There's no guarantee that such funding would be obtainable, though, or that
it wouldn't come with significant strings attached, that would conflict
with the basic principles and vision of the site, or lead to a lot of (what
I might consider) undesirable technical decisions being made. But we do
what we have to do to make what we are passionate about a reality, to the
extent that's possible given the resources at hand. Thanks,
--
Nathan Larson <https://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Leucosticte>