[Bug-gne]A suggestion for reformulation

[Imran Ghory]

I've come up with a proposal of an entirely new Encyclopedial 
system, which I think would avoid quite a few of the problems we've 
been discussing:

Have a standard format for Encyclopedia articles.

Have a "article module format" which would basically be a module 
which holds a number of articles.

Anyone could create articles and put them into a module, the 
module could then be uploaded to the web.

The author would then submit the URL to a central database. 

Anyone could use the central database to get the articles.

Indexers could use the central database to find articles which they 
like, and include them in their own indexes.

Front-end providers could pick which index to use and then go 
through the index and make copies of all of the articles locally.

We could also have a software client which could be used along 
with the indexes in order to allow people to have local copies of the 
encyclopedia. The software client could also allow people to add 
individual modules to their local encyclopedia. 

This way we would avoid the problem of hosting the data ourselves 
and thus avoid becoming legally responsible and also avoid hosting 
spam/binary bombs/etc. 

Also the individual front-ends could use whatever software they 
want, be it IIS/ASP or Apache/Perl, as the data would be 
independant of the software. It would also me we could start life a 
client end piece of software which would make it easier to start 
development.

What do people think ?

Imran Ghory