Jimmy Wales wrote:
No one has said anything negative about what
I'm proposing yet (that
I've seen) but I should make clear that I'm not at all talking about
making our free content costly for proprietary applications. It is only
the hammering of our (expensive) servers that I'm worried about.
If Microsoft or Apple wants to mirror Wikipedia and hit their own
servers, that's fine.
On a technical note, Brion announced that the XML produced by
Special:Export will be out new "dump" format, together with an import
script. Coincidentially, I recently wrote an extension that can list the
titles of articles changed since date/time X. Working together, these
two parts could enable mirrors to keep their databases up-to-date with
only a few hours/minutes delay to the "live" server, and without having
to transfer the whole database once every two weeks (which was the
release cycle, right?).
Magnus, we've had this for a few months actually. See extensions/OAI for
the client/server database updater system, which we're currently using
somewhat experimentally for a couple clients. Wikimedia plans to offer
this as a value-add service to commercial mirrors generally (and I hope
for non-profit mirrors, though you'd have to talk to Jimbo to know
what's up).
This uses the OAI-PMH[1] wrapper protocol to pull page updates,
formatted using the Special:Export XML schema.
(The client portion currently works only on a local 1.4 installation
though it's independent of the server version. I'll be tuning it up for
1.5 when I have a chance in the next few weeks.)
[1]