Decentralized Wiki

As a possible partial solution to the EditWars, what if Wiki was simply a "reference engine". Each person maintains their own info on their own servers and Wiki simply links it all? Vandals and info-terrorists then cannot delete stuff that they don't like (outside of hacking), only delete references at best. It is still not a perfect solution, but reference wars may be less annoying than content wars.

Wiki can weave the references together (as a virtual view). Further, individuals may agree to join up on their own terms to make cooperative editing easier. This provides a kind of "group self-policing" that the current wiki lacks. If you piss people off, they won't corporate with you. But, it does not squelch unpopular, but possibly valid opinions either.

Generally a content submitter will provide:

Topic name
Position within the page (decimal or floating point)
The URL pointing at wiki-formatted text.

(Editing features may reduce need to type actual numbers)

Rather than "compile" it for every view, the wiki engine would do it periodically. Links that go bad may be excluded after a month or so. This may help clean stuff up over time.

Further, references that are deleted are still kept in an "attachment" to the document for a while. Maybe have a threshold view option such that one can see the old stuff in place by specifying how far back (in decimal days) they want to see. Thus, things don't really get deleted, but perhaps just "fade" gradually. However, Wiki perhaps would not buffer the deleted content, unlike "active" content. Perhaps the "see deleted" option would use JavaScript to reconstruct the page instead of putting the burden on the server to fetch the pieces.

Different viewing options include:

"Regular" view
Contributor view that shows URL's of source.
Deletion view that shows old stuff in place (per number), perhaps with highlights. User parameters: days back (decimal), highlight mode (on/off).
Deleter view that shows who (IP) deleted something.

These are not necessarily mutually-exclusive.

Other options to consider include a "friends" and "enemy" lists. People give the URL of their lists and wiki (or a volunteer) allows people to browse with filters based on such lists. People could see the "Costin" view for example that excludes any mention of my alternative type definition.

I am just kicking around ideas. I don't claim this idea is ripe. And, I am not sure the topic name is appropriate. It is "half centralized". Suggestions?

--top

This looks similar to suggestions made previously, but it's beyond my ken to comment further.

See CrazyThingsThatMightSaveWiki, WikiChangeProposal

CategoryWikiCollaboration