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.