Hello comrades, I've run into a challenge too interesting to keep to myself ;) My immediate goal is to prototype an "offline" wikipedia, similar to Kiwix, which allows the end-user to make edits and synchronize them back to a central repository like enwiki.
The catch is, how to insert these changes without edit conflicts? With linear revision numbering, I can't imagine a natural representation of the data, only some kind of ad-hoc sandbox solution.
Extending the article revision numbering to represent a branching history would be the natural way to handle optimistic replication.
Non-linear revisioning might also facilitate simpler models for page protection, and would allow the formation of multiple, independent consensuses.
-Adam Wight