[Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think you are significantly overestimating the difficulty.  We
already have an API [1] and similar tools that allow one to accomplish
many similar tasks.  For example, calling ?action=render will give you
a llive HTML version of any current page that could be wrapped in a
external site's own framing and stylesheets (though one would need to
rewrite the url roots in most cases).  The API already has tools for
logging in and out while authenticating against WMF servers.  And
there is even a write API, though I believe that is currently disabled
on the main sites.

The API isn't really designed for what we are talking about, but in my
opinion the changes that one would want to make to support live
mirroring would all be straight-forward.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API