Versioning and distributed data
Live discussion next Thursday? Interest in an IRC chat: Tom Lord, Sasha Wait, IulianU...
There are a number of "semantic wiki" ideas, suggestions for p2p distribution of a big wiki, and for how to allow different groups to maintain their own wikis, but pull updated content from a favorite source from time to time.
At present, sites that pull updates from Wikipedia do so with their own ad-hoc scripts, either scraping the site with a web-crawler or waiting for the regular updates and extracting what they want from a full database dump.
Basic ideas
edit- Is there a way to let people contribute to the wiki without diving into the community? To coordinate a small local wiki about water purity with the Wikipedia category on the same subject?
- How can we efficiently allow people to download a small set of articles (with histories)?
- How about letting them synch their local changes with Wikipedia's database?
Some existing models
edit- BitTorrent (shared distribution of database-sized files)
- Perhaps some slow & steady version of BitTorrent, with good addressing of parts of a large database, can help people download Terabyte-sized files in the background, so their local db is never more than a few weeks out of date.
- GnuArch (two-way feedback, better versioning)
- Perhaps a better versioning implementation can help people in different communities & environments contribute to a single body of information, without having to try to merge their communities/interfaces.
Position statements
editThis section is for links to pre-meeting "opening statements" from participants interested in this topic.