Well, here's "lexikon.rhein-zeitung.de" speaking ;-)
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Yeah, but the *traffic* is part of the reason why the
'pedia is
*useful*; it's Metcalfe's Law incarnate. Pinching it off, and
particularly to be "just another feature" on some other website...?
Our mirror is (I hope so) perfectly linked with the original Wikipedia.
Editing article by hyperlink into Wikipedia and creating new articles by
clicking on a "red" link is all realized. I think we are part of the
*traffic* and therefore no obstruction of Metcalfes Law.
And that's a perfectly good justification for an
off-line copy.
The keyword is, of course, "off line".
I don't think so. Off line copies are expensive and slow. We load every
recent "pages-articles.xml.bz2" dump from the mirror: one or twice a
month (475 MB for the german version at the moment). We check our
mirrored pictures against the recent images table and load only new(er)
images down.
We don't do this because it's nice to have. Our goal was and still is a
fully and performant integration of the encyclopaedia into the news
environment and layout of our online magazine. Beside an ordinary search
forms, our readers can retrieving the Wikipedia content by
doubleclicking each word in each text (most suitable for nouns). For
performance reasons and perfect layout integration, we need a mirror and
not only links to
wikipedia.org.
Our Wikipedia mirror is also part of the intranet of some schools in the
county where internet access is restricted.
I hope that dumping wikis data will be handled as carefully in the
future as in the past - and will be available *online* without snail
mail or mounted messengers :-)
Cheers
jo