2011/8/14 Krinkle krinklemail@gmail.com

Hi all,

've read most of the previous mails so far. I'd like to clear some confusion (just in case). Please do correct me if I'm wrong and got caught by the confusion myself:

The thread is about one of the following:

• .. the ability to clone a MediaWiki install and upload it to your own

domain to continue making edits, writing articles etc.

Installing MediaWiki for you is easy for geeks. The only solution for newbies is using wikifarms.

• .. getting better dumps of Wikimedia wikis in particular (ie. Wikipedia)

A ten years old on-going task.

• .. being able to install MediaWiki easier or even online (like new wikis

on Wikia.com)

MediaWiki developers issue.

• .. making it easy for developers to fork the MediaWiki source code

repository.

Trivial. Any developer can set up a repository with a source code snapshot.

Gerard in the first post was speaking about 1) forks, 2) digital preserving

Forking single articles is easy, you just copy/paste (with histories you have to use import/export). Forking a set of articles is just a bit more difficult. Forking the whole Wikipedia is _hard_, you need a good infrastructure and skills.

Digital preserving is a big problem in computer science. It is not solved yet, but if you make backups frequently and in several places, you have a high security to save the data.

To fork you need first the data being preserved, and this links with the dumps generation problem above.

I think people is getting nervous with Wikipedia (and me too), in the same way people is getting worried with Google having control of all your online life (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google+, etc). If Google closes your account, your online life vanishes. If Google dies, your online life too. Of course you can export all your e-mail, contacts, etc, but you lose the @gmail.com address, all links in search engines to your data is broken, etc. Google has a good policy about exporting data, most Internet services don't.

The mankind is compiling all human knowledge in an encyclopedia, which is hosted in faulty metal plates spinning thousand times per minute, managed by faulty humans and located only in one or two locations in the world (Florida, the land of hurricanes and San Francisco, the land of earthquakes).

Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007. Playing with Wikipedia is so 2001. Losing knowledge is so 48 BC. This is the most important mission human race has ever achieve.

Regards, emijrp

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