Discussing the ability to have an off-line Mediawiki, I was wondering why there is no Mediawiki relying on git. Mediawiki is a de facto standard for the wiki users, every company has at least a Mediawiki for one or more project. Mediawiki strongly rely on the LAMP concept with a special emphasis on MySQL and the Structured Query Language (SQL) for the storage of the wiki content. At a first glance, it looks very difficult to move away from such centralized model to a decentralized model like git. The idea is not new and there are already some tentative :
- mvs (a command line Mediawiki client bundled with the perl module WWW-Mediawiki-Client) provides a kind of SCM interface to Mediawiki. You can take offline some pages (via an update command), edit your changes locally and commit them back to mediawiki. When doing an update, mvs is discovering any conflict. The application will try to solve the conflict (à la scm) and inform you for the unresolvable conflicts. It works quite well but you must know in advance the part of the wiki that you want to edit and this is not very convenient for the non-SCM user.
- Not related to Mediawiki, there is a wiki compiler called ikiwiki that can benefit from an SCM-style storage. ikiwiki can be configured to take advantages of any 'post-commit' hook in a SCM (like git) to publish the wiki right after the edit (and also benefit from the revision management from the SCM).
The main advantage of using a decentralized model for the storage in Mediawiki could help the off-line use of Mediawiki. Git works easily with branching without the hassle of CVS or Subversion. The techniques are there and freely available but the challenge is to provide a mix Mediawiki and git in an usable interface for the wiki users. Maybe someone is already working on a similar thing…
Tags : wiki mediawiki scm offline git decentralized wikipedia
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