At 04:20 PM 9/22/2004 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote:
Mandrakesoft wants that we provide them with a master DVD, and would like to complete this first edition for Christmas.
I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline.
My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe needed. It'd be not much different than the many websites that are already running static mirrors of Wikipedia content.
A lot of articles might wind up looking a little messy when images get stripped out, too. Hopefully the stripping process will be clever enough to take out the relevant [[Image:]] tags, but there will be leftover tables and divs and whatnot that get missed by this. Oh well.