[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

2009/4/23 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> 2009/4/23 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/4/23 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:

>>> I'll let you use p2pedia.org.  :)

>> Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki.
>> Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick
>> Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.

> I recall this being discussed before somewhere (mediawiki-l?). It's an
> interesting idea, but I don't know enough about git to know if it
> could actually be made to work (it would need something better than
> our current edit conflict system, for a start).


The idea's been floated a lot, and I think someone was playing with
it. But the notion of storing revs in a database - and rather a lot of
very specific, not very portable MySQL-specific optimisation - is
deeply rooted in the code. I suspect it would be rather a lot of work.

You could do something similar with database replication, but I
believe Wikimedia tried this - keeping the Asian-language wiki
databases on the Korean servers - and eventually decided it didn't
give much advantage and so everything went back to live on the honking
great servers in Florida.


- d.