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(a)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
:).