I am going to talk to Walter Bender's "electronic publishing" [http://ep.media.mit.edu/] group at the Media Lab this Friday. Their take on the future of publishing is that it will incorporate (among other things) distributed versioning; combining the automatic branch-and-merge version control that software developers now cherish, with human feedback and merge/branch assistance at many steps along the way.
One student is doing his formal research on just this kind of document versioning, which shares many hard problems with issues of translation linkage that I have been working on.
This is the second time in three months that someone has been eager to discuss the application of such versioning to Mediawiki; Tom Lord expressed a similar interest in August before Wikimania (hoewever, a remote discussion never came to fruition).
Are there any Mediawiki devs who have puzzled over / worked on this kind of problem? Philosophical arguments about whether distributed versioning is good for wikis?
++SJ