Gemlog #11

=>gemini://vault.transjovian.org

When I went back to the list of mirrored services in the Gemini community, I found two sites that provide the mirrored Wikipedia services. However, the other one was not available because the server said this page’s certificate expired. The one left that was available when I was browsing therefore drew my major attention, and I went to the link and tried its mirrored service. Frankly speaking, although I do think it is an interesting and inspiring project that has brought a representative non-commercial online platform into the Gemini community, both of which share the same notion to offer people free services and access to knowledge and digital resources, I still doubt if it is appropriate to transfer Wikipedia based on the universal HTML protocol to the Gemini Community based on its particular protocol. There are multiple advantages of the mirrored Wikipedia in the Gemini community. First, although it declares to offer multiple languages for users, it still remains English-centric. I tried to use Chinese to find sources, but it turned out that the Chinese service in the mirrored Wikipedia was not available. Also, I tried to use French, although it worked, the articles in French were inadequate as they only included some short extracts from original Wikipedia pages. Only when I visited English articles in this mirrored service, I could see the full articles. Furthermore, in Wikipedia based on the HTML protocol, there are indexes in each article that guide readers to the section they are interested in and save their time. However, this technical feature is not achieved in the mirrored Gemini Wikipedia. As Wikipedia itself is a text-based and advertisement-free platform, personally, I do not think the Gemini server can provide a more convenient and light-weighted way for people to access Wikipedia. It demonstrates the missions stated in the home pages of many Gemini servers are contingent on the specific online content they deliver.