On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:35 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > Adapting MediaWiki to git has been tried a few times. I suspect the > problem is that the software deeply assumes a database behind it, not > a version-controlled file tree. Wrong model for an easy fix to > MediaWiki itself.
Yeah, I don't mean it 'quite' that literally. I agree that literally incorporating git would be unlikely to be a simple solution-- I mostly mean 'incorporate the lessons of git'. A lot of those lessons could be implemented with existing software if the culture changes. Sandbox articles, for example, would be trivial to implement-- just stop deleting them. New project creation is about to get a LOT easier with Incubator extension. We don't yet have the technology to do distributed hosting, but we could do some sort of 'donated funds' hosting for specialist wikis that we might not feel comfy actually using our regular donations for. (or, we could decide the cost of such specialist wikis is negligible and just host them ourselves with our own donations.. case by case). The biggest barriers are cultural, not technological. We all 'grew up' hearing that "forks are evil", but funny story, turns out forks aren't only not evil, they're a huge advantage in collaborative document creation. Forks are only evil because we haven't learned the lessons of git yet, so we don't have a 'merge' yet. Alec _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l