On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Edit conflicts with live editing aren't an issue,
manual resolution is
trivial. Edit conflicts with significant delays are a much bigger
problem and require automated merging, which isn't always possible,
and is often very difficult.
Why do edit conflicts with significant delays require automated merging?
What's wrong with sending back a message that "your edit failed due to an
edit conflict", or even better "there was an conflict with your edit - it
has been sent to a queue for manual processing"? Sure, third worlders won't
be able to get into an edit war on the English Wikipedia version of [[George
W. Bush]], but that doesn't mean they can't contribute to one of the
millions of lower traffic articles.
We already have dumps (the latest dump of all enwiki primary content
finished a couple of hours ago and is 4.8 gig), all we
would need to
do is make incremental dumps available so people don't have to
download the whole thing repeatedly.
Great. Do it.
That would be pretty easy to
program compared to rewriting the whole of MediaWiki to function via
Waves.
Google has already done that, except it's not MediaWiki, it's something much
much more powerful and easy to use.