Folks,
Angela and Eloquence were in Pretoria, South Africa, between April 19-21
for an International FLOSS and Free Knowledge Workshop run by the
CSIR Open Source Centre, and Angela put out a notice of a meetup.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Pretoria
We met at the hotel, and then went out to dinner, quite a few people
from the af: wikipedia as well.
Eloquence talked about incremental updates, and followed up with this :-
Regarding the article feed, there's an implementation of the
OAI-PMH protocol currently in use for
http://www.answers.com -
see
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
for the specs. As you can see on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AOAIRepository, this is
currently limited in access (we are offering it as a service).
This seems to be at a higher level than keeping mysql consistent across
a possibly high-latency connection - it treats the wiki as a repository
of articles, and is a server that will furnish information about the
data, as well as the data itself. I have not looked into it far enough
to see if it supports a reverse feed, but I am sure one-way is a lot
easier :-)
I gather that mediawiki 1.5 will not treat the current version of an
article specially, enabling efficient support of OAI-PMH.
I said I wanted an rsync'able image archive.
Eloquence is a wiki-evangelist (save the world :-), and is currently
promoting [[n:Main Page|Wikinews]]. He obliged me to take another look,
which I have done. It is taking me a little time to get used to it, and
the form-based Search seems a bit puzzling, but an interesting front
page :-)
Angela talked about different language encyclopedia (af: has the most
articles, swahili next). We talked of the problems of prefix-based
languages in wiki markup space - [[sw:ntu]] (a man) should be easy
markup for an intext mention of [[bantu]], meaning men.
Thinking now the easiest thing is to reverse the markup order
Ba[[ntu:sw]] but it seems a bit radical, and has consequences for the
basis of other markup styles like the pipe separator.
There was Wayne Mackintosh, a fascinating guy from University of Auckland,
with eXe :-
The eXe project is developing an off-line authoring environment
to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content
without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup.
http://exe.cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/
He also needs or has an update protocol for eXe data, and had an interest
in high latency connections, and I refer him to
http://www.dtnrg.org/ .
My site
http://wizzy.org.za/ deals with email and web content delivery
over UUCP. I also put a wikipedia snapshot down in schools, very handy
(and faster) if schools are not dialed up during the day. If I can carry
the wiki changes over UUCP, I will be happy!
Thanks to CSIR
http://www.csir.co.za/ for enabling this.
Cheers, Andy!