[kde-edu]: Re: LinuxTag::Wikepedia

[Elisabeth Bauer]

Hi you,

first, sorry for breaking the thread but the posting was sent before I 
subscribed to the list.

Carsten Niehaus wrote:

> When I arrived Danimo suprised me by telling me that the dpa (biggest german 
> news agency) has been informed about the wikipedia and KDE-cooperation. Well, 
> in german magazines Kalzium and KStars have been named as the prime examples 
> why this is a good thing :)
> In the last couple of days I've been talking to elian from the wikipedia (she 
> is an official leader of the wikipedia and represented it on the LinuxTag)

as official as the rest of us - I'm in the board of the german wikimedia 
association...

Since I am no programmer, I'll comment on the content aspect:

[...]
> *** Elian proposed that we (KDE) will create wikipedia.kde.org. On   
> this page the authors will list the articles they are using. In my case I
> would make a list (eg in a simple xml are csv-file). I script will
> create a html-page out of this file (I volunteer for writing this
> script in Ruby). On this page we will mention on which date we will
> grep the articles from the wikipedias (the chinese, german, english
> and so on). The wikipedia-guys will take care that on that date
> there are only good articles.

This was a small misunderstanding between carsten and me: These pages 
with list of articles you take should be within wikipedia - otherwise 
the Wikipedians won't notice them.

What I imagine is similar to the concept of the german WikiReaders 
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader) - there users 
compile a list of articles about a topic for print. Before going into 
print, these articles are reviewed and improved by the community if 
necessary.

This is no automagical process but involves communicating with the 
people who work on a topic.

> Another point is that this will also show which articles have not yet
> been written in the different languages. Elian said that this
> situation will pretty quickly make people write or translate the
> articles.

As for the wikireaders - this has to be done in close contact to the
community. Collecting a set of articles and getting new articles to be 
written
means talking to the authors in the different language wikipedias
(this will be the hardest part, I can assist with establishing contacts 
there).

The technical discussion on our part takes place at the developer 
mailing list, wikitech-l (http://mail.wikipedia.org). One of the main 
problems which has to be solved on our side is the access to the 
webservice (so that a company can't DOS our servers with requests), will 
be a bit tricky if we want to do it all in the open source way.

greetings,
elian