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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

github wikis come to mind.

I've been hacking at gollum (github's FOSS git-based wiki) for some time, and I might have some interesting uses for it in the education space that go well past a basic wiki.

I'am writing a gollum like wiki atm. Its not finished yet, but works already and is not far away from a (stable) release: http://github.com/entropie/oy

My problem was gollum worked not behind Apache/mod_proxy, so i was forced to write it on myself ;)

Yea that seems like a pretty powerful concept in particular. I wonder, though, if people'd really care about the ability to edit something offline when they could just go with some wiki that has private restrictions on it.

I do, however, really like the idea of downloading a complete wiki, knowing that I can resync at a later date if content in my version becomes irrelevant.

I've been thinking about this idea actually. Sometimes, it'd be really handy to have blog posts (aka essays) under version control so you can edit them in your favorite text editor offline. At the same time, that could be very restricting; imagine if you were required to use git + text editor to edit/publish all of your posts.

Having the wiki paradigm in mind, it didn't occur to me that one -would- use their preferred text-editor, but that's maybe a big benefit right there. What if it were a desktop app running in the background that monitors these text files and is smart enough to handle all git operations behind the scenes? And what -is- it about long form writing that is just inconvenient on the internet? haha

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