On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Subramanya Sastry
<ssastry(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On most weekdays, there is a fair bit of activity,
except for occasional
periods of lull. I assume you probably caught a period of lull.
The parsoid team is mostly based in California, and tend to be online PST
working hours, ie noon-8pm EST on weekdays. That's the best time to
contact people. Some members of the team use an IRC bot to let them catch
up on backlog when they're not online, but not all, so if you don't get a
response it's usually best to either send an email to wikitext or else just
wait until the next 'working day'.
You and Scott have similar goals then since he is interested in using
Parsoid in situations without internet or spotty
internet as well, if I
understand it correctly. In this context, he has been doing some code
cleanup, handling some edge cases, and contributing patches.
There are instructions on the wiki for cloning the git repo of parsoid and
running your own instance. I've also successfully set up an instance on a
free appfog server; let me know if you're interested in that (and maybe I
should think about merging those patches to make it easier for others).
My embryonic offline wikibrowser is at
http://github.com/cscott/nell-wikipedia ; you can try it out at
http://nell-wikipedia.github.cscott.net, although the offline stuff isn't
implemented yet, it's mostly a showcase for how well (or not) Parsoid
renders the wikitext.
If you're interested in offline wikibrowser tech, I'd love to have help.
The novel thing I'd like to do here is allow offline wiki editing,
snarfing in some of the visual editor codebase to do so with panache. One
Laptop per Child has over two million laptops in the field with offline
copies of spanish and english wikipedia, but the current app is read-only
-- which defeats the purpose of a wiki, really. The current app's snapshot
is also out of date, because the original version required a lot of offline
tools to grunge over a wikipedia xml dump to make a new snapshot; my goal
is for this next version of the app to be able to update its snapshot
itself whenever it's online.
--scott