[Foundation-l] Software idea: a "Wikipedia Explorer" that lets you browse Wikipedia and more

Tue Dec 27 23:02:58 UTC 2011

Actually, I don't think Wikipedia or Wikimedia Foundation has to do
everything. They just need to maintain this platform: Wikipedia, just like
Microsoft just needs to maintain Windows and let third party developers to
develop apps for Windows.

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Jürgen Fenn <
> schneeschmelze at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Am 27. Dezember 2011 23:24 schrieb Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com>:
>> > In my original message I mentioned "a chat room and a forum for every
>> > Wikipedia article". For chat rooms, yes, an IRC server has to be created
>> > (or use an existing IRC network such as FreeNode). For forums, however,
>> we
>> > don't need a centralized forum server. Wikipedia Explorer will help the
>> > user create a blog with Blogger.com, and put all his "forum posts" on
>> this
>> > blog, and call Google Blog Search to retrieve blog posts associated
>> with a
>> > particular Wikipedia article and then merge them into a "forum" view.
>>
>> Again: No desktop software, but a cloud solution. Even though I am now
>> posting from a Google account, we do not need Google or indeed any
>> other company for that, we can do it ourserves, there are free
>> alternatives we can set up for the community.
>>
>
> The reason I mentioned "desktop software" is for server costs reasons. If
> wikipedia.org is not going to implement these features, we're supposed to
> create another website that:
> (1) mirrors Wikipedia's content (text, images, and that's huge, as I've
> just checked out how large Wikipedia's image base is now);
> (2) provides additional services such as a chat room/forum for every
> Wikipedia article.
>
> I'm just an individual in China and I'm not gonna create such a mirror
> site and incur global traffic, which will definitely bankrupt me. So
> instead I'm planning a desktop-based browser that simply browses
> wikipedia.org and provides additional features such as ebook creation,
> creating a FreeNode chat room for the currently browsed Wikipedia article,
> creating a virtual forum in a "distributed" manner by storing each user's
> posts on a Blogger.com blog and retrieving article-specific posts with
> Google Blog Search. All these features won't involve building my own
> server. LOL!
>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jürgen.
>>
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>
>