[Foundation-l] Software idea: a "Wikipedia Explorer" that lets you browse Wikipedia and more

[Yao Ziyuan]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Jürgen Fenn
<schneeschmelze at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Am 27. Dezember 2011 23:24 schrieb Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com>:
> > In my original message I mentioned "a chat room and a forum for every
> > Wikipedia article". For chat rooms, yes, an IRC server has to be created
> > (or use an existing IRC network such as FreeNode). For forums, however,
> we
> > don't need a centralized forum server. Wikipedia Explorer will help the
> > user create a blog with Blogger.com, and put all his "forum posts" on
> this
> > blog, and call Google Blog Search to retrieve blog posts associated with
> a
> > particular Wikipedia article and then merge them into a "forum" view.
>
> Again: No desktop software, but a cloud solution. Even though I am now
> posting from a Google account, we do not need Google or indeed any
> other company for that, we can do it ourserves, there are free
> alternatives we can set up for the community.
>

The reason I mentioned "desktop software" is for server costs reasons. If
wikipedia.org is not going to implement these features, we're supposed to
create another website that:
(1) mirrors Wikipedia's content (text, images, and that's huge, as I've
just checked out how large Wikipedia's image base is now);
(2) provides additional services such as a chat room/forum for every
Wikipedia article.

I'm just an individual in China and I'm not gonna create such a mirror site
and incur global traffic, which will definitely bankrupt me. So instead I'm
planning a desktop-based browser that simply browses wikipedia.org and
provides additional features such as ebook creation, creating a FreeNode
chat room for the currently browsed Wikipedia article, creating a virtual
forum in a "distributed" manner by storing each user's posts on a
Blogger.com blog and retrieving article-specific posts with Google Blog
Search. All these features won't involve building my own server. LOL!

>
> Regards,
> Jürgen.
>
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