On 2/19/07, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Finally, in both the IM and Email cases,
race-conditions become a serious
issue. How do you determine which publishing entity (IM, Email client, or
wiki user) got there first? Using a standard interface (the wiki)
alleviates this problem.
Can you elaborate on this? Presumably at the server end there are IM,
email and web interfaces to the wiki database. How is the question of
an IM and an email "update" command arriving simultaneously any
different from that of two web POST commands arriving simultaneously?
I would love it if there was an email-to-wikipedia interface, mainly
because my mobile phone gives me unlimited email for free (whereas web
browsing is ridicously expensive - go figure). There do appear to be a
lot of fairly significant hurdles though: authentication, parsing
email (stripping out signatures, demangling character conversions,
avoiding accidental changing of whitespace etc), and of course the
potential for significant lag between receive and update - is merging
really a safe option when the article may have been downloaded 6 hours
earlier?
Incidentally, is there by any chance a read-only email fetch mechanism
for Wikipedia?
Steve