“Let’s do this then,” Mako said.
And that was all it took.
We were sitting in a cafe. Mako was leaning against the end of the booth, half reading a paper. Chris was wandering back and forth from the table, listening to the house musician, a lone guitar player, and talking with us. Mika and Andres shared crepes. As they talked, Mika leaned forward to listen to him. Chris sat back down at the table and told me about his job. The conversation shifted and Mako put his reading down.
They started talking about Wikipedia. One of the problems with updating it, Mako saw, had to do with the nature of Wikipedia readers. You cannot update Wikipedia from a reader, or from offline, very easily. Mako suggested–possibly on the internet, he can’t remember–that it would be possible to make it so that people could suggest changes. They’d be able to make notes to themselves and have it automatically upload to the discussion page of the associated Wikipedia article once an internet connection could be established. Chris was concerned.
This thread of conversation sprawled out of a discussion–read: talk by Chris–on One Laptop Per Child. His concern over Mako’s suggestion was related to OLPC. “Many of the kids [who are part of the OLPC program] will never connect to the internet.” The ability to change articles, and contribute to the open nature of Wikipedia, would be outside of the experience of these children.
“We can have [the changes] stored,” Mako said. He went on to explain that these could be loaded onto a USB key that could be set up to update Wikipedia once an internet connection becomes available.
This was okay with Chris. He and Mako agreed to do it.
And that was all it took.