On Sat, 29 May 2004 11:16:28 +0200, Mathias Schindler neubau@presroi.de wrote:
At de.wikipedia, we are using the MediaWiki namespace for things like current events.
Has anyone tried to export those parts into a rss/rdf file, i.e. [[MediaWiki:Hauptseite Aktuelle Ereignisse]] on de or [[MediaWiki:In the news]] on en?
I think there might be some useful purpose for this file for external web sites and this could also help wikipedia.
[... de-lurking, since I have worked on various RSS and Atom syndication projects before.]
1. Not to start a holy war or anything, but if you are going to be syndicating, you really should use Atom. Most major newsfeed readers support it; those that don't yet, most likely will soon, and in the interim people can run scripts which convert Atom to RSS using a simple XSLT transformation. Atom is *more* flexible, has a single standard (rather than 9 different, ad hoc, and incompatible versions--see http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss), and is much more flexible.
2. That said, you may very well *not* want to do any syndication on WikiPedia at the moment, whatever the format. Why? Well, because delivery mechanisms for syndicated feeds are currently *terrible*. WikiPedia has enough load-related performance problems as it is; imagine the same situation, except with a significant portions of your users reloading one page over and over again every 10 minutes to see if something has changed (most newsreaders *default* to polling somewhere around every 5-15 minutes).
-C