[Mediawiki-l] Media Lab, distributed versioning and authoring text

Wed Oct 5 18:16:54 UTC 2005

I am going to talk to Walter Bender's "electronic publishing"
[http://ep.media.mit.edu/] group at the Media Lab this Friday.  Their
take on the future of publishing is that it will incorporate (among
other things) distributed versioning; combining the automatic
branch-and-merge version control that software developers now cherish,
with human feedback and merge/branch assistance at many steps along
the way.

One student is doing his formal research on just this kind of document
versioning, which shares many hard problems with issues of translation
linkage that I have been working on.

This is the second time in three months that someone has been eager to
discuss the application of such versioning to Mediawiki; Tom Lord
expressed a similar interest in August before Wikimania (hoewever, a
remote discussion never came to fruition).

Are there any Mediawiki devs who have puzzled over / worked on this
kind of problem?  Philosophical arguments about whether distributed
versioning is good for wikis?

++SJ