2009/4/23 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>:
2009/4/23 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
> 2009/4/23 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>:
>> 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.