[Foundation-l] getting Wikipedia to the 5.2 billion people who can't access it

Anthony wikimail at inbox.org
Sun May 31 15:02:17 UTC 2009


It's interesting thinking about it this way, because Wave could potentially
even replace Wikipedia.  Transfer the contents of a Wikipedia article to
Wave, and make a widget to display the current article (or, even better, the
latest approved version).  Now anyone can start a mirror with virtually no
costs by just putting the widget up on a website.  I wonder how access
control works.  Can any Wave recipient give read/write access to anyone
else?  That'd be problematic.  Can a bot be added to control the access?  If
not it seems like an easy extension to add.

It'd be a major money drain on Google, though.  They'd bear virtually all of
the hosting costs, and it's hard to see how they'd get anything in return.
Something would have to give eventually.  But once the protocol is out and
the reference implementation is out, maybe it wouldn't matter.  People could
start up their own servers.

Adapt or perish, WMF.

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hoi,
> Much of the Wave  functionality demonstrated is superior to what is
> available in MediaWiki. Consider a LAN with OPLC systems, consider a Wave
> server on the school server.. It would be pretty damn good to be able to
> have all kinds of activities that makes use of the functionality that is
> part of the reference implementation. Consider what a talk page would look
> like when with the Wave "back" functionality.
>
> Anthony said it before, think here of what Wave can do when you concentrate
> on its Wiki aspects. Now consider a talk page.. when it changes you may get
> an e-mail, you can go there and edit it... All this functionality is there
> and more, Wave allows you to have a real time conversation.. And all of
> this
> can happen on your LAN, your WAN or your Internet.
>
> Given its license I am excited, given the demonstrated functionality I am
> excited. The first thing is to get MediaWiki content into Wave. A developer
> friend of mine has read the developer documentation and thinks he can do
> this. What is needed is for him to have access to a Wave environment where
> he can experiment.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> 2009/5/31 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
>
> > 2009/5/31 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> > > Hoi,
> > > Wave in its reference implementation relies on HTML 5. This means that
> it
> > > requires a modern browser. With a browser it is possible to access data
> > that
> > > is on a LAN or on the local computer. This would allow us to have
> > > "Wikipedia" type content stored locally or on a LAN. One question is
> how
> > > will resources will react when newer data becomes available, will it
> > > synchronise? When a resource available to Wave *can *be updated, it
> makes
> > no
> > > difference if it on a system on a LAN or on the WAN / Internet when it
> is
> > > the availability of data that is essential.
> >
> > What would be the point of that? Wave is good for collaborating, not
> > reading. If all they are going to be doing is reading Wikipedia then
> > just download a dump and put in on a local apache server for your LAN.
> >
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