I hardly write e-mails and even post to the mailing-list, so if I did something wrong, just let me know. Also, I am well known for terrible speeling and non-English grammer, please excuse them too.
I have some proposal to the wikipedia system.
I don't have any worry about the encyclopedical side of wikipedia. Both quality and coverage have been improving constantly. It is just fine. But recently I started to worry about technological side or hosting stuff.
While contents of wikipedia are open-conent and it is nice, hosting server and database are not. As we all know the current server is inadequate to support the huge traffic and it seems going to be worse and worse.
Now then, here is my proposal. Can we distribute database and related stuff? Each mimi-wikipedia contains certain articles and provide both displaying and editing service. Search querys are sent to all of mimi-wikipedian then put the results together in the main server and return it.
The scale of mimi-wikipedia may vary, say 100 artcles to possibly 10,000. I think there are many people who are willing to provide diskspaces, including me.
The problem is set up. Surely the current dependency hell makes hard to host mimi-wikipedia, particularly on windows- based servers.
Another problem is what if some mimi-wikipedian is down? For financially, lost of personal interest, whatever reason. My solution is duplication.
Also this duplication scheme makes wikipedia more reliable and easier to extend the capacity in terms of hosting.
I don't know if this kind of system is fesible. I don't see such a site. But if we agree the idea is good, why don't we try it?
I agree with the guy who suggested pure wikipedia software written in C (I am sorry I can't remember his name).
Also, if there was some similar proposal before, excuse me.