I think I can support an idea that would hope to turn otherwise passive consumers into not-so-much-any-longer passive consumers. As long as pseudonyms remain acceptable.
If you think highlighting and bookmarking of Wikipedia articles is extremely valuable --- and maybe it is! --- go start a site backed by Wikipedia's content. In the places where it actually counts, Wikipedia has bent over backwards to be helpful to developers.
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that, given infinite time, they will have to fight all these fires eventually. To delay the inevitable by not actively encouraging user registration is a disservice to the entire editorial platform.
* Blanking a page, or part of a page, is an action that any editor can perform, and any editor can undo. This hides content from the "live" page, but anyone can view the blanked content by looking in the page's history. * Deleting a page is an action limited to administrators, and similarly, only an admin can undelete a page. A deleted page is basically treated by MediaWiki like it doesn't exist, and only admins can view the deleted content. Individual edits can also be deleted, but this is not as common. * Lastly, oversighting can be used to hide content from even admins. Admins can oversight stuff as well, and in these cases, the oversighted content can be viewed by other admins, though it requires more work than viewing deleted stuff. For oversighted content to be hidden even from admins, the oversighting must be done by another user group called (aptly enough) oversighters. In the context of WMF project, entry to this usergroup is tightly controlled (seriously, it makes the request for adminship process look like an open door), and anyone selected for the role must personally confirm their identity to the WMF.
The main point is that, in all of these cases, the content is never gone, but simply hidden; the MediaWiki software is designed so that every action is logged and can be reversed.
Can a 3rd party even maintain a fully up to date set of wikipedia content? Not sure what their policy on scraping is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revi...
brings back:
{
"query": {
"pages": {
"1666533": {
"pageid": 1666533,
"ns": 0,
"title": "Y Combinator (company)",
"revisions": [
{
"*": "{{Infobox company\n| company_name = Y Combinator\n
[...redacted full wikitext content of article...]"
}
]
}
}
}
}One problem I've found with the dump is that you still need to render it (unless someone knows of another dump) which has caused us a few problems with the current thing I'm working on.