[Foundation-l] Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

One thing that interests me about the idea of using git (or something
like it) as the backend is not so much the distributed aspect - though
if it makes it easier to take good backups, or to replicate copies
from the central git repo, that'll be a *major* improvement over the
present situation

But what catches my eye is the sophisticated attribution abilities of
git. Git regards the fundamental unit as the entire project; so if you
move a subroutine from one file to another, it will treat that as a
single change and the attribution will follow the lines moved.

Mapping this to a text wiki is of course not quite the same thing -
off the top of my head (1) what is the unit to work in? Paragraphs,
sentences, words? (2) How to detect cutting text from one article and
pasting it into another as a "move"? (2a) Cleaning up attribution by
hand afterwards? - but it's an interesting and I think useful idea.


- d.