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.
My experience from situations like the one you describe tells me that the designed system can easily get more complex and cause more overhead than the needed performance gain, and that Moores law will give us the speed that we need in time when we need it.
Do you have any experience from designing systems like this? Would you write a prototype for this system that could be tested? The vision sounds like science fiction to me, but a prototype that I can run is not science fiction, so that would make all the difference.
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.