[Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

[basedrop]

Hello Thomas and thanks for your response.

I would point out that the foundation created a French version,  hosted it
on French servers, in the French language because they saw the benefit of
delivering something to a specific constituency.

I don't have a particular need to have the art history portion of the wiki
editable for my users at my domain.  I have the specialized users at my
site,  I'd like to take advantage of that aggregation of specialized users
to the benefit of the wiki.    If you guys don't have an API for me,  I'm
o.k. with that.   

Web content is becoming more integrated across multiple platforms and
domains.   People can post to Facebook from twitter.  People can check Gmail
from POP3 clients.  People can post to a blog, and the data will instantly
replicate over multiple blogs around the world.  I can pull data from
multiple sources and aggregate it with an rss feed reader.   This is the
direction content and the web is heading.  

Bring the users to one domain, and keep the content within that domain can
be called the "walled garden" approach.  It is not a bad one, when you have
a need to control the users (e.g. facebook,) and the content.   In the case
of the wiki,  I'd suggest a more democratic approach of bringing the wiki to
the people.   You already do that with a push version of the wiki,  I'm just
suggesting you take it one step further and make it editable.   Imagine
sections of the wiki,  right where the experts are aggregated.   Space.com
hosting a concurrent version of the astronomy section.   Technology at
slashdot.org.   Law at nolo.com... you get the drift.

You guys consider this.  In the mean time I'll build up my site and my user
base.   If there is a way to integrate in the future,  I'll do that.  I'm
going to shoot for using openID, so this is just another reason for you guys
to consider the use of openID as well.

Michael

 

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 3:57 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] mirroring a portion of the wikipedia

2009/2/18 basedrop <basedrop at gmail.com>:
>
> Hello,
> I'm not sure if this is the place to pose this question,  if not could you
> respond with the proper place.
>
>  I'm building out a social networking site centered around an "art" and
> "arthistory" theme.  I would like to display a real time dynamic version
of
> the arthistory section of the wikipedia at my domain.

Possible, but unlikely to happen, I'm afraid. There is little to be
gained for us compared to you just sending people to the main site.

>I would like for my
> users to be able to edit this section at my domain.

I don't think that's possible - at best all the edits would be from a
single account, and we don't really like group accounts.

>   My domain is
> arthistory.com.   I am hoping to be able to provide a lot of acedemic and
> specialty users to this section via my site.   I think we could both
benefit
> from this relationship.  My users have direct access to the arthistory
> section of wikipedia,  the wikipedia gets access to my users who are
experts
> in the field.

We would very much like to encourage your users to edit Wikipedia, but
it really would be much easier for us if they just came to our site.
Is there some reason why they particularly need to be doing it from
your site?

>    I understand you can get a feed of the wikipedia, and also
> a database dump,  but I'm looking for a more real time and dynamic
> connection  (without just putting the wikipedia in an iframe.)

I don't know of anything like that being done before. If it's just one
section of the site you could probably mirror it pretty well by
crawling it once a day or so - we don't like people crawling the whole
site, but one section shouldn't be a problem. If you want it
completely up-to-date then you need to access the Wikipedia servers
for each request, so you might as well just be on wikipedia.org

>   I'd also
> prefer if I could use openID or some way of repurposing my user's
> registration to duel register with my site and with wikipedia, and create
a
> login session for both simultaneously.

I'm sorry, we don't use openID on Wikipedia. It has been suggested,
and it's possible we will in the future, but we don't right now.

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l