On 12/08/2011 8:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
THESIS: Our inadvertent monopoly is *bad*. We need to
make it easy to
fork the projects, so as to preserve them.
I have an idea that might be practical and go some way toward solving
your problem.
Wikipedia is an impressive undertaking, and as you mentioned on your
blog it has become part of the background as a venerable institution,
however it is still dwarfed by the institution that is the World Wide
Web (which, by the way, runs on web-standards like HTML5 :).
To give a little context concerning the start of the art, a bit over a
week ago I decided to start a club. Within a matter of days I had a
fully functioning web-site for my club, with two CRM systems (a wiki and
a blog), and a number of other administrative facilities, all due to the
power and availability of open-source software. As time goes by there
are only going to be more, not less, people like me. People who have the
capacity to run their own content management systems out of their own
garages (mine's actually in a
slicehost.net datacenter, but it *used* to
be in my garage, and by rights it could be, except that I don't actually
*have* a garage any more, but that's another story).
The thing about me, is that there can be hundreds of thousands of people
like me, and when you add up all our contributions, you have a
formidable force. I can't host Wikipedia, but there could be facilities
in place for me to be able to easily mirror the parts of it that are
relevant to me. For instance, on my Network administration page, I have
a number of links to other sites, several of which are links to Wikipedia:
http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Network_administration#Links
Links such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion
Now by rights there could be a registry in my MediaWiki installation
that recorded
en.wikipedia.org as being another wiki with a particular
content distribution policy, such as a policy permitting local
mirroring. MediaWiki, when it noticed that I had linked to such a
facility, could replace the link, changing it to a link on my local
system, e.g.
http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Wikepedia:Subversion
There could then be a facility in place to periodically update the
mirrored copies in my own system. Attribution for these copies would be
given to a 'system user', such as the 'Interwiki Update Service'. The
edit history for the version on my system would only show versions for
each time the update service had updated the content. Links for the
'edit' button could be wired up so that when someone tried to edit,
http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subversion
on my server, they were redirected to the Wikipedia edit facility,
assuming that such a facility was still available. In the case that
Wikipedia was no more, it would be possible to turn off mirroring, and
in that case the 'edit' facility would allow for edits of the local content.
That's probably a far more practical approach to take than say,
something like distributing the entire English database via BitTorrent.
By all means do that too, but I'd suggest that if you're looking for an
anarchically-scalable distributed hypermedia solution, you won't have to
look much past the web.
John.