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

[Anthony]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.


Why do edit conflicts with significant delays require automated merging?
What's wrong with sending back a message that "your edit failed due to an
edit conflict", or even better "there was an conflict with your edit - it
has been sent to a queue for manual processing"?  Sure, third worlders won't
be able to get into an edit war on the English Wikipedia version of [[George
W. Bush]], but that doesn't mean they can't contribute to one of the
millions of lower traffic articles.

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.


Great.  Do it.


> That would be pretty easy to
> program compared to rewriting the whole of MediaWiki to function via
> Waves.


Google has already done that, except it's not MediaWiki, it's something much
much more powerful and easy to use.