On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 12:44:14AM +0200, Jochen Magnus wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Yeah, but the *traffic* is part of the reason why the 'pedia is *useful*; it's Metcalfe's Law incarnate. Pinching it off, and particularly to be "just another feature" on some other website...?
Our mirror is (I hope so) perfectly linked with the original Wikipedia. Editing article by hyperlink into Wikipedia and creating new articles by clicking on a "red" link is all realized. I think we are part of the *traffic* and therefore no obstruction of Metcalfes Law.
Hmmm...
So, I go to your site, and I see a problem with a page, and I click on the Edit link, and I make the change, and I go back to...
1) not your site and the change is there.
2) your site, and the change is *not* there.
Neither of those seems perfect.
And that's a perfectly good justification for an off-line copy. The keyword is, of course, "off line".
I don't think so. Off line copies are expensive and slow. We load every recent "pages-articles.xml.bz2" dump from the mirror: one or twice a month (475 MB for the german version at the moment). We check our mirrored pictures against the recent images table and load only new(er) images down.
So, the only reason I *do* like for an offline mirror, you don't like.
Those people completely off the grid shouldn't have Wikipedia at all?
We don't do this because it's nice to have. Our goal was and still is a fully and performant integration of the encyclopaedia into the news environment and layout of our online magazine.
And my assertion, based on the either/or above, is that you don't actually *have* that.
I hope that dumping wikis data will be handled as carefully in the future as in the past - and will be available *online* without snail mail or mounted messengers :-)
And, again, I wasn't trying to agitate against this, by any means, and I hope that's clear.
Cheers, -- jra