John Elliot (2011-08-12 13:36):
[...] The thing about me, is that there can be hundreds of thousands of people like me, and when you add up all our contributions, you have a formidable force. I can't host Wikipedia, but there could be facilities in place for me to be able to easily mirror the parts of it that are relevant to me. For instance, on my Network administration page, I have a number of links to other sites, several of which are links to Wikipedia:
http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Network_administration#Links
Links such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion
Now by rights there could be a registry in my MediaWiki installation that recorded en.wikipedia.org as being another wiki with a particular content distribution policy, such as a policy permitting local mirroring. MediaWiki, when it noticed that I had linked to such a facility, could replace the link, changing it to a link on my local system, e.g.
http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Wikepedia:Subversion
...
That's a very interesting idea... And it should be really hard to do.
Let's say you linked the Subversion article and you've set up that the address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1 To be hosted as: http://www.progclub.org/wiki/en-wiki:...
Now each time your user clicks on a link everything gets registered in your installation as "to be downloaded" and upon given number of clicks and/or given number of resources and/or at given time to be downloaded to your site.
The tricky part would be that you not only need the article itself, but also it's templates and that can be quite a lot with first articles you get. Further more this extension would probably need to allow users to opt-out of downloading images and maybe instead of getting wikicode just host rendered HTML so that you don't really need to host templates.
And speaking of images - the problem with any of the solutions is - who would really want to spend money to host all this data? There were times when Wikipedia had many hold ups, but now I feel there are more chances that your own server would choke on the data rather then Wikipedia servers. Maybe ads added to self hosted articles would be worth it, but I kinda doubt anyone would want to host images unless they had to.
BTW. I think a dynamic fork was already made by France Telecom. They fork Polish Wikipedia and update articles in a matter of minutes (or at least they did last time I've checked - they even hosted talk pages so it was easy to test). You can see the fork here: http://wikipedia.wp.pl/
Note that they don't host images though they host image pages.
Regards, Nux.