David Gerard wrote:
"Imagine if Wikipedia could be mirrored locally,
run on a local
mirror, where content was pushed and pulled, GPG-Digitally-signed;
content shared via peer-to-peer instead of overloading the Wikipedia
servers."
The idea of P2P distribution is good. The idea of using Git for this is not.
This is exactly what Git is *not* optimized for: lots of individual
files with almost no relation to each other. The same reason you are
advised to not use Git to version control your home directory.
Git handles trees, not individual files. In a wiki like MediaWiki, each
article has its own history and revision control. Merges to an article
doesn't mean that the whole tree (many gigabytes big) must be handled in
the same tree-wide commit. The user must be able to commit changes to
the most recent revision of, for example, [[Los Angeles, California]],
and push such commits while still holding an outdated revision of some
unrelated article, like [[Comic opera]].
The rate of changes in en.Wikipedia can me measured in edits per second,
and these edits are only related to each other (ancestor-descendant
relationship) in each own article. To move to a model where the whole
Wikipedia is a single repository with single tree-wide revisions would
severely disrupt its efficiency.
Ironically, the per-file revision control model employed by
now-obsolescent VCSes like CVS and RCS would fit Wikipedia better than
Git (emphasis on revision control *model*, not software).
--
Juliano F. Ravasi ยทยท
http://juliano.info/
5105 46CC B2B7 F0CD 5F47 E740 72CA 54F4 DF37 9E96
"A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle." -- Erin Majors
* NOTE: Don't try to reach me through this address, use "contact@" instead.