On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:20 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://advogato.org/article/994.html
Peer-to-peer git repositories. Imagine a MediaWiki with the data stored in git, and updates distributed peer-to-peer.
"Imagine if Wikipedia could be mirrored locally, run on a local mirror, where content was pushed and pulled, GPG-Digitally-signed; content shared via peer-to-peer instead of overloading the Wikipedia servers."
This would certainly go some way to solving the "a good dump is all but impossible" problem ...
http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2007-11-10_Dreaming_Of_Mediawiki_Using_GIT
It takes about ~10 minutes to create a mwdump to git converter using git-fast-import. I did this for amusement once in order to run git-blame on articles. I'm not so clear on what else do with it once in git. One advantage is that the storage requirements are reasonably modest.
It would be nice to see have more advanced SCM features in the Wiki... but between the technical challenges and the learning curves (even most CVS and SVN users barely know howto do more than checkout and check-in), I wouldn't expect it anytime soon.