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

[Yao Ziyuan]

For example, instead of putting a forum on every Wikipedia article, we can
let any third party to provide such a forum externally, and Wikipedia just
needs to do a Google query to present these "third-party resources" (e.g.
forums) to the reader. Let's see an concrete example:

Suppose a third party "Uncle Sam" wants to provide a forum for discussing
the mobile phone "Galaxy Nexus", he can create a "resource manifest" page
on his forum's server, saying:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Topic-ID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_nexus
// Resource-Type: forum
// Title: Uncle Sam's Galaxy Nexus discussion forum
// Description: Discussing issues related to Galaxy Nexus
// URL: http://www.unclesam.com/forums/galaxy_nexus
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

After he publishes this "resource manifest" page on his server, Google will
index it, and Wikipedia will be able to retrieve this resource for readers
of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_nexus . It works like this:

Now a person named Alice is reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_nexus . Below the normal encyclopedic
article, Wikipedia will provide a section called "Third-party resources".
This section is automatically generated by doing a Google search for the
exact phrase "Topic-ID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_nexus", which
will list all third-party resources designated for this topic. The
"Third-party resources" section can also filter these search results by
resource type (e.g. only showing forums), and sort them by date or by
relevance (done by Google).

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 7:02 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually, I don't think Wikipedia or Wikimedia Foundation has to do
> everything. They just need to maintain this platform: Wikipedia, just like
> Microsoft just needs to maintain Windows and let third party developers to
> develop apps for Windows.
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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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>>
>>
>