Forking wikis

2013 May 28 (Tuesday), 5:12PM

I wish wikis were less collaborative! I wish they were more like software projects, where if one wants to modify anything, one gets one’s own copy and does anything at all to it.

No, I’m not really saying that there should be fewer centralised places of communal effort, these things are great… I just want a good way to branch and modify non-code content.

A cross between the Internet Archive’s system for uploading content into their collections, and Github’s user-centric arrangement.

The problem seems to often come back to the formats that things are in. It’s easy in the text-only code world; but wiki’s each have their own markup…

I wondered about the use of MediaWiki, and pulling in remote articles (periodic synchronisation), but of course there’s no merging in that idea, so it doesn’t work. It’s what Printable WeRelate does, but I’m yet to quite figure out how that’s going to deal with local additions to the data (probably, pages will be quite separate, with links only going from the local-only content to the remote-sync’d stuff; because we can’t modify the remote articles locally, and links in them when they’re elsewhere wouldn’t make sense).

So, there’s no solution: I’ll stick to centralised editing and storage, but carry on pulling backups (huzza to Wikiteam).