On 2/20/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
If i had such free service, i'd set a server doing it for me :P If it's a 'private' service, things gets easier: -Authentication: Use a variable account name as password.
A "variable account name"?
-Stripping out signatures: You use the same email ssystem -> Always the same signature.
Well, not strictly true. Friend of mine puts his server's uptime in his sig...
Is merging really a safe option when the article may have been downloaded 6 hours earlier? If it hasn't changed, yes ;) If it's a poppular article, probably not. But merging could wait until i sit in front of a proper computer.
The more I think about the way the current merging algorithm works, the more I think it's probably ok. Because if I'm not mistaken, the system compares what you originally saw with what you're submitting now, and applies those *changes*. So if the original text you're modifying read like this:
John is happy. John is rich.
And you submit this text: John is happy. John is extremely rich.
And meanwhile someone has modified the text thusly: John is sad. John is rich.
Then the final text looks like this: John is sad. John is extremely rich.
(though I think the actual granularity is much higher, like paragraph level).
So depending on the frequency of updates, this may be ok. Certainly I edit many pages which don't receive as much as an edit a week, and the few they receive are predominantly typos, interwiki links, categories, new stub tags...
Steve