Hi - I am running a reasonably large wikimedia site (a few thousand pages) and have thought for a while about a certain desired feature I have, which I suspect a number of other wikimedia sites might find quite helpful.
Background: Armeniapedia.org is for articles on anything and everything to do with Armenians. So, for example, it can have articles on anything from Yerevan to George Bush. Now the Yerevan article, in theory, should not need to be any different than the one on Wikipedia, while the George Bush article, should have only Armenia(n) specific information that would not be fitting on Wikipedia. Armeniapedia is also a good home for say online cookbooks, texts, etc, etc.
The idea: For articles like Yerevan, it would be nice to somehow synch my site with Wikipedia. If I could somehow specify that a certain article on my site is a sister article to Wikipedia, then allow the article on my site to automatically update itself on a timely basis (weekly or so), plus whenever someone wants to edit they get automatically taken to the wikipedia article's edit page, it would allow both sites to benefit.
I'm sure other ways of implementing this would be possible, but the basic idea I think (and hope you agree) is a good one.
Thanks for reading this...
On 8/10/06, Raffi Kojian armenia@gmail.com wrote:
I'm sure other ways of implementing this would be possible, but the basic idea I think (and hope you agree) is a good one.
It sounds very much in keeping with the goals of Wikipedia's freeness. Depending on how many articles are involved, your best bets might be: * regularly grabbing the Wikitext page via some web-enabled script (and locking the page to prevent people editing it) * regularly downloading a whole database dump, and pulling out the few pages that you want * Using cross-wiki links (like [[w:George W Bush]] instead of [[George W Bush]]) - not sure about the configuration required to make that happen * Trying to do something tricky whereby the content of the [[George W Bush]] page is dynamically sucked from Wikipedia, and the edit button actually does edit it on Wikipedia.
Note that several of these techniques are explicitly prohibited ("live mirroring" and all that), so you'd want to get permission before doing any of them, and obviously they'd only be practical if the demand would be quite low.
Steve
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org