[Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

[Chad]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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


Just to clarify on one point here: the write API is enabled on all sites.

-Chad