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(a)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... ;)]
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]