Nick Hill wrote:
I envisage many wikipedia servers around the world, supported by private individuals, companies and universities. Much like the system of mirror FTP and mirror web sites. All these servers are updated in real time from the core wikipedia server. From the user's perspective, all are equivalent.
Having read-only database copies with MySQL's replication sounds doable, at least in theory. All edits would be directed to the mama website. User accounts (ie for watchlists) are maybe a trickier matter, as we'd rather not send passwords and e-mail addresses around willy-nilly.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Here is another vision: I envision a system where I can synchronize my laptop or PDA with a wiki, then go offline and use it, update it, and when I return to my office I can resynchronize the two again. I have no idea on how to implement this vision. I think it would be a lot of work. But I think the result could be really useful.
I also see there are similarities between your vision and mine. The idea is to express the update activity as a series of transactions (update submits) that can be transfered to another instance or multiple instances and be applied there. In either case, one must take care of the case that the transmission of updates gets interrupted or delayed, and the potential "edit conflicts" that would result. It doesn't seem trivial to me.
Distributed editing is, indeed, a rather bit tricker than distributed reading, and not something I really want to touch with a ten foot pole right now. :)
See also discussion on a client-side Wikipedia reader/editor at: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_Wikipedia_editor
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)