tarquin-
But "Paper" is definitely something we need
to look into.
However, it is more complex than sifting -- for example, we'd need a
single article on "Lord of the Rings" that we would have to distill from
the current dozens on characters, places, films, etc
Count me as a supporter of that idea for the online version as well ;-).
Truthfully, we need a better way to handle multiple versions of a page --
effectively something like branches in CVS. This is useful for handling
protected pages (edit a branch copy of the page and merge changes into
main page once a certain time has elapsed or when a sysop approves the
changes), for handling temp pages, and for handling permanent branches for
the printed version. To do this we would need some good merging code which
would also be useful to mostly get rid of those damn edit conflicts. Of
course we would have to be careful to avoid overbranching into POV
versions, perhaps by requiring each new branch to be approved in
consensus.
We'll also need a flag for whether to include an article in the printed
version or not (at this point the number of page-flags is getting so big
that it is becoming increasingly useful to separate them into a meta
namespace).
Hehehe, lots of work for our team of trained code monkeys ;-)
But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time
ago about
producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)
So do I. How cheap can we get? It might be more cost effective to build
Wikipedia reader computers using old machines and cheap harddrives in the
single digit gigabyte range (of course that requires the cheap
availability of electric power, which makes it a non-starter for the
poorest countries). With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro for
embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).
Regards,
Erik