[Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/19 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
> So the question really should be, what of this would be to our disadvantage?

It's very difficult to set up technically, for a start. Live mirroring
of existing content isn't too hard, but sorting out editing would be a
nightmare. We presumably wouldn't want everyone editing under the same
account (we are generally opposed to role accounts, so I would imagine
we would be opposed to this kind of group account as well), which
means we need some way for the mirror site to authenticate accounts
with the Wikimedia servers, which is a security nightmare (I expect it
can be done, but it would require some effort). We would need to deal
with edit conflicts caused by delays in the mirroring (which would be
sure to happen from time to time), again, not impossible, but it
requires effort.

There needs to be a significant advantage for it to be worth all that
effort, and I don't see one. If people want easy access to references,
etc. they can use custom skins and scripts - they are far easier to
write than live mirroring software. You could even make a skin that
looks just like the other site if you really wanted to.