Takuya Murata wrote:
I hardly write e-mails and even post to the mailing-list, so
if I did something wrong, just let me know. Also, I am well
known for terrible speeling and non-English grammer, please
excuse them too.
I have some proposal to the wikipedia system.
I don't have any worry about the encyclopedical side of
wikipedia. Both quality and coverage have been improving
constantly. It is just fine. But recently I started to worry
about technological side or hosting stuff.
While contents of wikipedia are open-conent and it is nice,
hosting server and database are not. As we all know the
current server is inadequate to support the huge traffic and
it seems going to be worse and worse.
Now then, here is my proposal. Can we distribute database
and related stuff? Each mimi-wikipedia contains certain
articles and provide both displaying and editing service.
Search querys are sent to all of mimi-wikipedian then put
the results together in the main server and return it.
The scale of mimi-wikipedia may vary, say 100 artcles to
possibly 10,000. I think there are many people who are
willing to provide diskspaces, including me.
The problem is set up. Surely the current dependency hell
makes hard to host mimi-wikipedia, particularly on windows-
based servers.
Another problem is what if some mimi-wikipedian is down? For
financially, lost of personal interest, whatever reason. My
solution is duplication.
Also this duplication scheme makes wikipedia more reliable
and easier to extend the capacity in terms of hosting.
I don't know if this kind of system is fesible. I don't see
such a site. But if we agree the idea is good, why don't we
try it?
I agree with the guy who suggested pure wikipedia software
written in C (I am sorry I can't remember his name).
That's me!!! :-) I have the same worries.
It is a shame that "WikicWeb" lost its' C sourcecode,
read:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikicWeb
Possibility to download a (weekly or so) snapshot, or a
tarball containing ALL WikipediaNL content (-Idols) would
also be nice. :-)
Agree, we should think (brainstorm) about distributed
servers, but this is a very difficult topic (for me at least).
I think I _can_ write a proper and reliable WikiServer in
pure C (only needing a proper POSIX OS). I think it can
only be done if Wiki-syntax is defined very strictly,
expanding the software will be difficult / dangerous in C.
I agree C sure has some major drawbacks. (As wiki's evolve,
software might need to adapt with it: On the other hand,
people know the evolution of Wiki now: we should come to
an Open Standard for Wikipedia-syntax (ban html and so, or
choose for full HTML4.01 and ban Wiki-syntax). If all these
problems can be solved (needs consensus) a very FAST server
in pure C can be set up: only dependancies will be:
1: Operating system (Preferably some sort of Linux or other Unix).
2: C Compiler (Preferably GCC).
3: A physical machine attached to the internet.
4?: Maybe some sort of progressive compression algorithm
(as an alternative for diff maybe?)
I've got more weird ideas: I'll make the source-code of my pure-C-
wikisoftware available via its' WikiWebInterface ITSELF! This way,
I'll never loose my sources! (the recursive trick).
Now Wikipedia depends on Sourceforge. This is not necessary:
Wikipedia could own their own sources on
Wikipedia.org itself.
I am searching for proper C-alternatives for Wikipedia.
Preferably with with Wikipedia-functionality.
If I cannot find it, I will develop my own Wiki in pure C.
I only need a very strict definition of Wikisyntax (and semantics).
One can do without mySQL and Apache and do it ALL
in ONE programming language. If we do it all in C,
we only need a proper compiler: GNU's GCC and an OS nothing else!
Thanks for reading :-)
(C-madman) Pieter Suurmond
Also, if there was some similar proposal before,
excuse me.
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