Brion wrote:
Theoretically, one might keep them as physically separate wikis/databases while _encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are consolidated into a single database that is aware of the connections between languages.
Yes, please lets have all the encyclopedia sections in one wiki and keep this separate from non-encyclopedia projects such as meta, sep11 etc. This is conceptually clean and also allows for meta to be a place where Wikipedians can go when, for whatever reason, the encyclopedia wiki is down (being on a separate sever would further help). Meta also works differently than the encyclopedias do and will probably need to become a hybrid PediaWiki/bbs (or something) in the future. So in order to allow for the evolution of Meta it really should be kept separate (the same is true, to an extent, for the other non-encyclopedia projects).
Or, all sections (the encyclopedia in each language, the multilingual meta-discussion, and the any-language memorial wiki) could go into a single glob, and we make a distinction between types of sections only for purposes of linking encyclopedia articles on the same topic together.
I don't like this option at all. It does makes perfect sense to have all encyclopedia sections in one wiki but tribute sections and Meta should be on their own Wikis (one for all tribute sections and one for Meta - ProjectSourceburg should probably also have its own wiki too since this project really does need special software features). In terms of either their goals or software needs each project (encyclopedia, tribute, meta and source) is a different animal and really should have their own cages.
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 10:43:44AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
I don't like this option at all. It does makes perfect sense to have all encyclopedia sections in one wiki but tribute sections and Meta should be on their own Wikis (one for all tribute sections and one for Meta - ProjectSourceburg should probably also have its own wiki too since this project really does need special software features). In terms of either their goals or software needs each project (encyclopedia, tribute, meta and source) is a different animal and really should have their own cages.
With correct design, each Wiki can run in it's own cage, despite having a single database in common. Postgresql supports more than one connection at the same time... Head on over to Clutches mod_wiki page if you would like to participate in the design work.
The one problem I see right now is the namespace issue. Right now the namespace syntax is overloaded to handle languages as well as namespaces. And now namespace syntax is supposed to be overloaded to point to completely different wikis? I think we need a newer, more sensible syntax for expressing all these things as links in our Wikipedia pages.
Is it really important not to know whether something is a namespace, or a pointer to an external Wiki? And how can we distinguish a "language" code from a namespace? I don't like the brute force method of comparing against every possible language code.
Jonathan
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