On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Jason Olshefsky <[email protected]>wrote:
> I can see cranking out eBooks, but in a way, it would be not-quite-trivial > to make something that makes a Wikipedia eBook (if there isn't one already.) > I used to have such a thing, in fact. It was an application that ran on my Archos PDA. It was text-mode only because the Archos didn't have a native web browser (had to install Opera), so it used Lynx. At that time (6+ years ago) I had to do an apt get to install it, but the install clearly could have been automated, and the documentation suggested that, at least with the tools Wikipedia was making available at that time and assuming you had a certain not unrealistically high (albeit higher than mine) level of skill with shell scripting and PERL, it pretty much bordered on trivial. It would probably be harder now because: Wikipedia is so very much larger now; and I think they stopped making the whole catalog available for download in XML by wget to whoever wants it. But since MediaWiki pages are very highly structured, someone with an intermediate level of JavaScript, Ruby, or PERL knowledge should in principle be able to script a scraper. It would take a hell of a long time to crank, though. -- -- eric scoles | [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
