Folks,

Angela and Eloquence were in Pretoria, South Africa, between April 19-21 for an International FLOSS and Free Knowledge Workshop run by the CSIR Open Source Centre, and Angela put out a notice of a meetup.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Pretoria

We met at the hotel, and then went out to dinner, quite a few people from the af: wikipedia as well.

Eloquence talked about incremental updates, and followed up with this :-

Regarding the article feed, there's an implementation of the OAI-PMH protocol currently in use for http://www.answers.com - see http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html for the specs. As you can see on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AOAIRepository, this is currently limited in access (we are offering it as a service).

This seems to be at a higher level than keeping mysql consistent across a possibly high-latency connection - it treats the wiki as a repository of articles, and is a server that will furnish information about the data, as well as the data itself. I have not looked into it far enough to see if it supports a reverse feed, but I am sure one-way is a lot easier :-)

I gather that mediawiki 1.5 will not treat the current version of an article specially, enabling efficient support of OAI-PMH.

I said I wanted an rsync'able image archive.

Eloquence is a wiki-evangelist (save the world :-), and is currently promoting [[n:Main Page|Wikinews]]. He obliged me to take another look, which I have done. It is taking me a little time to get used to it, and the form-based Search seems a bit puzzling, but an interesting front page :-)

Angela talked about different language encyclopedia (af: has the most articles, swahili next). We talked of the problems of prefix-based languages in wiki markup space - [[sw:ntu]] (a man) should be easy markup for an intext mention of [[bantu]], meaning men.

Thinking now the easiest thing is to reverse the markup order Ba[[ntu:sw]] but it seems a bit radical, and has consequences for the basis of other markup styles like the pipe separator.

There was Wayne Mackintosh, a fascinating guy from University of Auckland, with eXe :-

The eXe project is developing an off-line authoring environment to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup.

http://exe.cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/

He also needs or has an update protocol for eXe data, and had an interest in high latency connections, and I refer him to http://www.dtnrg.org/ .

My site http://wizzy.org.za/ deals with email and web content delivery over UUCP. I also put a wikipedia snapshot down in schools, very handy (and faster) if schools are not dialed up during the day. If I can carry the wiki changes over UUCP, I will be happy!

Thanks to CSIR http://www.csir.co.za/ for enabling this.

Cheers, Andy!