I'm moving this from the English Wikipedia to wikipedia-l. It never really should have been on wikien in the first place.
On 5/14/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
Now, if we do all this, there's one additional little step we could take. As noted above, the fact that Wikipedia is free content itself helps to guarantee the availability of the text. So, while China's Wikipedia block is bad, I think in the long run it primarily hurts editors, not readers, who will hopefully find mirrors of the content. Now imagine most mirror copies of Wikipedia content carried a notice like this (in the applicable language):
I was thinking about this. Now I know there are tons of mirrors of the English Wikipedia, but what about the Chinese one? I guess I could just do my own study, but if someone happens to know already that'd be easier :).
Also, I'm not sure how advanced China's text filters are. According to Wikipedia they only apply it to certain pages they've designated ahead of time. But as that technology improves even many of the mirrored articles would still be blocked if they weren't served by https.
So that brought me to my current working idea, which is just a vmware player virtual machine [*] which hosts a Chinese Wikipedia mirror on https. So essentially all you'd have to do is download a file and click install and you'll be helping spread Wikipedia in China. The actual content could be downloaded in the background using bittorrent, so there wouldn't be any additional load on Wikipedias servers. Hey, if some people want to help me (it shouldn't be too hard), and we can finish by May 26th, we can even enter it into the contest at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/, maybe get some extra publicity (I doubt it'd win, but might get some sort of special mention).
[*] Anthony, you don't need to tell me about the literal requirements of the GFDL. :-)
LOL, OK, but shouldn't the [*] have gone after the part about "we are legally allowed to incorporate their improvements into the Chinese Wikipedia"?
[*] Erik, yes, vmware player is proprietary freeware. You can port the software to QEMU or some free virtualization program if you'd like :).