Are you aware of WP at http://wordpress.org ? This blogging software has a feature that allows submission by email. I think MediaWiki 1.4 could include such a feature. WP is GPL so you can share the code with them.
On Friday 22 October 2004 22:22, NSK wrote:
Are you aware of WP at http://wordpress.org ? This blogging software has a feature that allows submission by email. I think MediaWiki 1.4 could include such a feature. WP is GPL so you can share the code with them.
how many people do you think will use such a thing, and why? are there people having acess to a mailclient, but not a browser?
daniel
Daniel Wunsch wrote:
On Friday 22 October 2004 22:22, NSK wrote:
Are you aware of WP at http://wordpress.org ? This blogging software has a feature that allows submission by email. I think MediaWiki 1.4 could include such a feature. WP is GPL so you can share the code with them.
how many people do you think will use such a thing, and why? are there people having acess to a mailclient, but not a browser?
daniel
Yup, people at works behind a firewall that block wikipedia. But they should do something else instead of editing wikipedia :o)
For NSK: In the case of wikis, we will have to get people to send the diff against the current version. It restricts even more the number of people that could need this feature (how many people in this mailing list know how to use diff ?).
It will be too much work for nothing :o)
On Saturday 23 October 2004 00:26, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
Yup, people at works behind a firewall that block wikipedia. But they should do something else instead of editing wikipedia :o)
what people behinde restrictive firewall 'should' do is not ours to decide, imho.
For NSK: In the case of wikis, we will have to get people to send the diff against the current version. It restricts even more the number of people that could need this feature (how many people in this mailing list know how to use diff ?).
i don't think so - the browser does not send a diff, but a full version - so why should that be different for email?
daniel
On Saturday 23 October 2004 00:36, Daniel Wunsch wrote:
how many people do you think will use such a thing, and why? are there people having acess to a mailclient, but not a browser?
Many people in non-Western countries where they still use primitive connections (if they have one) will use it. E-mail traffic is much preferred over web traffic in slow connections. POP was designed with this factor in mind. I have WP to be full of US and EU-specific information, but the info on Africa and Asia is so undeveloped. You need to help these people to have access to your content.
A system where the user could type an email including:
"GET Africa"
Wikipedia mail server would return the whole article text of the "Africa article"
and:
"HIST Africa"
would return the history of that article.
Now:
"POST Africa <br /> Blah-Blah-Blah"
would update the "Africa" article.
et cetera.
I also think that you could allow people in the third world to update WP by regular mail. You could print third world-related articles in cheap paper and mail it to some African schools or universities where the Net is still very expensive. The students will send you updated content through regular mail and you could OCR or type the updates in the site.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org