[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia teamwork

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

Jan Hidders <hidders at win.tue.nl> writes:

> Because the GFDL allows you to download everything and start your own
> server.

Well the GFDL also wants transparent copy to be easily available. I
don't consider spidering wikipedia to be an option open to the "man
from the street".

So someone at wikipedia.com should /really/ implement periodic snapshots
of the wiki database. Technicalities can't be a problem, just add
something like

  18 04 * * * tar czf /webspace/wikipedia-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz /wikidir
  16 04 * * * find /webspace -maxdepth 1 -name wikipedia-\* -mtime +7 | xargs rm

(2 lines) to an appropriate crontab. Pretty please?

> With some Perl magic you could request all edit-pages and dowload
> the pre-formatted text, [...]

Sure, and perhaps I'll do that some day. But it puts much more
workload on the server than providing a snapshot, so I'd rather avoid
it. And if more people exercise their rights in this manner, it will
only get worse. A snapshot is much lighter on bandwidth and CPU, can
be mirrored via standard software.

> you could even use the same Wiki software, and I'm
> sure we can trust Bomis enough to warn us in advance.

For me its not so much a question about trusting Bomis than of
convenience and "taking your own license seriously".

> However, Larry is doing an excellent job and I see no sign that this is
> going to change. So setting up an alternative server would not only be a
> bit silly, but also higly unthankful, considering the wonderful opportunity
> they have given us.

Setting up a read-only mirror would certainly be useful, and not in
the least unthankful in my mind. Free licenses are about the *freedom*
to route around the original originators/maintainers/creators of a
piece of work. Witness that in the free software scene, such forks are
quite rare. Maintaining something is work, and nobody takes that
likely on themselves (and if they do, they usually give up pretty
quickly).

-- 
Robbe
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