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

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/31 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 2009/5/31 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>> > If you watched the Wave presentation you'll see that there is quite a bit
>> of
>> > edit conflict handling already built in (they showed three people editing
>> > the same page simultaneously).
>>
>> I did watch it. That was live, they could see each other editing and
>> avoid each other. There was no conflict. You are talking about people
>> without live internet connections.
>>
>
> Watch it again then.  There was at least one conflict, and they even pointed
> it out and mentioned conflict resolution.
>
> Clearly if two people edit exactly the same text one of the edits is going
> to fail.  But that's not the common situation.

Edit conflicts with live editing aren't an issue, manual resolution is
trivial. Edit conflicts with significant delays are a much bigger
problem and require automated merging, which isn't always possible,
and is often very difficult.

>>> All people reading Wikipedia need is a plain HTML file per article,
>> nothing
>> >> more.
>> >
>> >
>> > Easier said than done, though.  The static HTML Wikipedia dumps haven't
>> been
>> > updated since June 2008.  With Wave, updates are instantaneous.
>>
>> MediaWiki updates are instantaneous. Where is the improvement in
>> people reading Wikipedia via Wave?
>
>
> One advantage, the one we were talking about, is that you don't need to be
> connected to the Internet while you're reading it.
>
> Yes, you could in theory implement such a thing without Wave, but unless the
> WMF starts offering free live feeds (even for intermittent connections),
> it's not going to be updated like Wave is.  Maybe the WMF won't support
> access to Wikipedia articles through Wave, but then, a fork will, and the
> WMF's goal ("to empower and engage people around the world to collect and
> develop educational content under a free
> license<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:free_content>or in the public
> domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally"),
> is still met, even if their particular implementation of it isn't.

We already have dumps (the latest dump of all enwiki primary content
finished a couple of hours ago and is 4.8 gig), all we would need to
do is make incremental dumps available so people don't have to
download the whole thing repeatedly. That would be pretty easy to
program compared to rewriting the whole of MediaWiki to function via
Waves.