[Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/19 basedrop <basedrop at gmail.com>:
> Hello Thomas and thanks for your response.
>
> I would point out that the foundation created a French version,  hosted it
> on French servers, in the French language because they saw the benefit of
> delivering something to a specific constituency.

Delivering something to a specific constituency **which they couldn't
otherwise get**. Your users can access wikipedia.org (in whatever
language they like) perfectly well. It's not at all comparable.

> I don't have a particular need to have the art history portion of the wiki
> editable for my users at my domain.  I have the specialized users at my
> site,  I'd like to take advantage of that aggregation of specialized users
> to the benefit of the wiki.    If you guys don't have an API for me,  I'm
> o.k. with that.

Put a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Visual_arts
on your site and encourage your users to follow it - that will do the
same thing much easier.

> Web content is becoming more integrated across multiple platforms and
> domains.   People can post to Facebook from twitter.  People can check Gmail
> from POP3 clients.  People can post to a blog, and the data will instantly
> replicate over multiple blogs around the world.  I can pull data from
> multiple sources and aggregate it with an rss feed reader.   This is the
> direction content and the web is heading.

None of those forms of content are collaborative (to the same extent
as a wiki, anyway), which makes a big difference.

> Bring the users to one domain, and keep the content within that domain can
> be called the "walled garden" approach.  It is not a bad one, when you have
> a need to control the users (e.g. facebook,) and the content.   In the case
> of the wiki,  I'd suggest a more democratic approach of bringing the wiki to
> the people.   You already do that with a push version of the wiki,  I'm just
> suggesting you take it one step further and make it editable.   Imagine
> sections of the wiki,  right where the experts are aggregated.   Space.com
> hosting a concurrent version of the astronomy section.   Technology at
> slashdot.org.   Law at nolo.com... you get the drift.
>
> You guys consider this.  In the mean time I'll build up my site and my user
> base.   If there is a way to integrate in the future,  I'll do that.  I'm
> going to shoot for using openID, so this is just another reason for you guys
> to consider the use of openID as well.

I really don't see the benefit. Wikipedia isn't a walled garden - we
link to other sites, other sites link to us. Links are what makes the
web so great. There is no need to duplicate content between sites with
all the confusion and replication issues that causes, you can link
from one site to the other.