Sounds infeasible to me; resolving the edit conflicts would be disastrous. If we get a genius on this, it's plausible, but until then, it seems unlikely. I'm CCing this to Wikitech-l to see if they can have a go at this, though.
John Lee ([[en:User:Johnleemk]])
James R. Johnson wrote:
I was thinking about how I could work on Wikipedia offline, and though it would be great to have a stand-alone wikipedia client, which a wiki-user could download that would allow him to download wikipedia content, edit it while offline, then upload it when he gets to an internet connection. The user would set it to download either new, edited, or any other type of pages changed since his last upload.
What do you think?
James
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
James R. Johnson wrote:
I was thinking about how I could work on Wikipedia offline, and though it would be great to have a stand-alone wikipedia client, which a wiki-user could download that would allow him to download wikipedia content, edit it while offline, then upload it when he gets to an internet connection.
John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com replied:
Sounds infeasible to me; resolving the edit conflicts would be disastrous.
Actually, a quick glance around pointed me to two discussions on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Client and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_Wikipedia_editor, "jEdit plugin" http://www.djini.de/software/wikipedia/, and a seemingly fairly well-developed stand-alone editor: http://wikiwriter.sourceforge.net/ [for completeness, I should mention the Mozilla/Firefox plugin, although this isn't AFAIK aimed at offline editing]
To me, the 'WikiWriter'/'Diderot' project looks like, if developed well enough, it could easily gain the kinds of features you were after. I do agree that making an edit but not uploading it until you get your connection back could lead to some rather major version merge conflicts, but for significant rewrites and expansions, or indeed totally new articles, this would seem less of a problem; perhaps the software could recommend you leave a note on the Talk: page that a rewrite was in progress to minimise duplicated effort.
[Now, who was it in that programming language war that said they'd prefer Python... ;)]
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