github wikipedia fork using GURL, a gist for a url

3 points

15 years ago

* GURL a variation on the gist concept. Just adds a url to the other 3 items on the gist form: 1. url 2. name 3. description 4. content

Then, the next time some creates a gist with the same url, or forks your gist, they both become part of the same network graph.

You could put some validation on the name or the url to prevent abuse, but all allowed wikipedia pages should probably be legal urls...

This would be a super easy way to fork the wikipedia on github.

https://github.com/tinku99/gurl

Github probably dwarfs wikipedia in terms of the amount of data they store. So scalability is probably not a show stopper. And gollum already supports mediawiki formatting.

Although there is a proposal for a distributed wikipedia: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wiki... I don't think the existing wikipedia is going to disrupt itself like this. It has to come from outside.

I think this would finally fork the deletionists into irrelevance.

This way, we don't have to deal with parsing the mediawiki content / templates... We also don't have to worry about github taking responsibility for auto translation of problematic content from wikipedia. There won't be any auto translation.