User:HaeB/Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals

Timeline of "distributed Wikipedia" proposals

A timeline of - mostly independent - proposals for a kind of distributed Wikipedia (abolishing the principle that there is only one current article version for each topic), and more specifically, proposals to apply the principles of distributed revision control (as exemplified by Git in software development) to wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. Also noting significant related material.

The historical notes in V. Grishchenko's paper Deep Hypertext with Embedded Revision Control Implemented in Regular Expressions (WikiSym 2010) mention several other examples of distributed wiki software and credit Ward Cunningham (1997) as author of the first distributed wiki proposal, it also describes relations to ideas from Project Xanadu.

• 1997: Ward Cunningham: Folk memory: A minimalist architecture for adaptive federation of object servers
• 2001/2002: According to Andrew Famiglietti, "the history of Wikipedia and Wikipedia like projects shows a long list of failures to implement a 'marketplace of ideas' model. GNUpedia, an attempt by the FSF to build its own encyclopedia in 2001, imploded after selecting a technologically ambitious plan to build a repository of texts users could filter by their own criteria. .. Wikipedia users batted around plans to build similar 'multiple stable versions' in the fall of 2001/spring 2002. None were ever implemented." (see also Wikinfo)
• July 2005: Meta:User:TomLord/distributed wikis ("...a kind of p2p take on wikis. I should be able to selectively import articles from yours to mine, edit them locally and upload. If I have a specialized wiki of my own, you should be able to merge it into your more general wiki..."), see also meta:Versioning and distributed data
• August 2005: In Ward Cunningham's keynote (video and slides) at the first Wikimania, a kind of distributed wiki concept - similar or identical to "Folk memory" - is described (within the last third of this presentation. Watching the video is recommended, the slides alone are not very easy to understand)
• February 2008: Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia Thread on Foundation-l (inspired by the release of git-wiki)
• July 2008: "Federating Wikipedia as Open Educational Resource". Presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Murugan Pal from the CK-12 foundation, about extracting content from Wikipedia for use in other formats, also discusses synchronizing (merging content back into Wikipedia), includes some demonstration of their "FlexBooks" software.
• August 2009: Side remark in my Wikimania talk that git-like forking/merging tools might foster cooperation between Wikipedia and Citizendium
• August 2009: strategy:Proposal:Distributed Wikipedia ("Communities can then decide who to view as 'authoritative'. In other words, the entire Wikipedia database could in theory entirely be forked. Democratically. In this way, much of the criticism of Wikipedia's process simply... melts away.")
• October 2009: Wikipedia meets git Thread on Foundation-l. Also mentions git-wiki, gitit, ikiwiki, wigit, DSMW (Distributed Semantic Media Wiki), ...
• November 2009: During a very public controversy about deletions on the German Wikipedia (mainly fueled by members of the Chaos Computer Club), German hacker Scytale announces Levitation, a software project to import XML Wikipedia dumps into Git repositories. It produces a functional version (tested on some large Wikipedias), but peters out before achieving Scytale's vision of an "Omnipedia" ("everyone his own Wikipedia").
• November 2009: Distripedia (short blog post, apparently without many consequences)
• March 2010: Maja van der Velden: "When Knowledges Meet: Database Design and the Performance of Knowledge", talk at the "Critical Point of View"(CPOV) conference, summaryvideo, suggests "decentering Wikipedia further" to a "distributed database of local ontologies" (ca.14:20- in video), cf. [1]
• May 2010: Gitizendium [2], [3]
• May 2010: CPOV interview with Florian Cramer (also mentions Levitation)
• July 2010: Federating Wikipedia (presentation at Wikimania 2010, by V. Grishchenko)

Additions welcome, but note note that this is not about the related proposals to host/distribute Wikipedia (in its current form) using P2P transfer (such as meta:P2P or this)