[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia teamwork

[Jimmy Wales]

Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
> 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?

Yes, this can be done, or something similar.

The main thing a person should be able to do is download all the data,
untar it, and launch their own competing site.

What we'd *really* like, though, of course, and I think I'm not just
speaking for myself but for the consensus of the community, is for people
who are unhappy with our work to talk about it within the community.  So
far, we've been pretty good about working on accomodation, at least for
those who agree with the central concept of an 'encyclopedia'.

So what we should probably do is distribute an easy-to-download database
(which is, ironically, a more transparent format than raw ascii, although
we could distribute that too, I suppose) AND we should distribute a 
version of the wiki software that is "read only".  That is, we make
it easy for people to set up mirrors that point back to here for edit
purposes.

In this way, we let other people mirror the data (for example, wouldn't
it be sweet if Yahoo or Google did so?) but we also encourage them not
to establish a competing community.  (Though we can't stop them if they
really want to do that.)

> 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.

Oh, yes, absolutely.  Indeed, if someone started spidering the whole site
to provide a mirror, I'd ask them to stop and to work with me on something
more sensible!  Spidering is very inelegant, when I've got the data files
right here for the asking.  :-)

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

Right!

> 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).

Yes!


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