Saturday, January 13, 2007

Wiki Scalability

The main strength of wikipedia is centralized collaboration, which gets redundancy considerably lower. But the strength doesn't scale at all. Nowadays we've got redundancy all over the wiki, and no way to deal with it. A structure would help, and it will probably be introduced at some point, but the migration will not be an overnight process. A real solution would implement something like reusable objects everywhere, through heavy info modularization. We also have yet to see an implementation of a distributed wiki system. Google shows up ideas dating back years ago, but I haven't heard about any real-life solution. I would like to see a DNS-like system, fully distributed, but not redundant at the same time, working across all wiki flavors. The kind of redundancy we would want to see for data security (backup) should be achievable through much the same mechanism DNS does.