2009/4/23 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki. Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.
I recall this being discussed before somewhere (mediawiki-l?). It's an interesting idea, but I don't know enough about git to know if it could actually be made to work (it would need something better than our current edit conflict system, for a start).
The idea's been floated a lot, and I think someone was playing with it. But the notion of storing revs in a database - and rather a lot of very specific, not very portable MySQL-specific optimisation - is deeply rooted in the code. I suspect it would be rather a lot of work.
You could do something similar with database replication, but I believe Wikimedia tried this - keeping the Asian-language wiki databases on the Korean servers - and eventually decided it didn't give much advantage and so everything went back to live on the honking great servers in Florida.
- d.