On 2/19/07, Jim Wilson wilson.jim.r@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