On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 07:00:31PM +0100, Axel Boldt wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Please do *not* use programs such as Webstripper. Especially on dynamic sites like Wikipedia, they create a huge amount of load on the servers by
[...]
While I of course agree with Brion's statement, I think we should also try to understand the other side. When I was still on a dial-up line that charged by the minute, I also several times tried to download interesting sites all at once, so that I could read them leisurely off-line. That seems to be quite natural behavior. You can't really learn stuff when the clock is ticking.
Don't we have a nice compressed static HTML tree by now that we could offer people under the "Download Wikipedia" heading on the main page?
I see no problem about the possibility to generate a whole Wikipedia (mirror) site as a static snapshot. Probably it could be done with minimal modificaiton of the scripts. Static content can be retrieved by bots without causing any trouble.
Consider it as a special mirror.
I'm not volunteering though ;-)
g.