TRtrin_·Jul 29, 2012
somehow reminds me of
https://github.com/scy/levitation
but that doesnt seem to have gone anywhere...
In Gitit is a wiki backed by a git, darcs, or mercurial filestore.scy
levitation
Python2010–2012
scy / levitation
levitation
Tools to convert Wikipedia dumps into Git repositories.
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
128GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Tools to convert Wikipedia dumps into Git repositories.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-12-24 06:24:34 UTC to 2012-07-29 19:49:18 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2010 | 2010-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jan 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2011 | 2011-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2011 | 2011-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2011 | 2011-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2011 | 2011-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2011 | 2011-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jul 2011 | 2011-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2011 | 2011-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2011 | 2011-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2011 | 2011-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2011 | 2011-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Dec 2011 | 2011-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2012 | 2012-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2012 | 2012-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2012 | 2012-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2012 | 2012-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2012 | 2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2012 | 2012-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesMediawiki is indeed a very poor substitute for a VCS, and things could probably be improved. For example, there once was a project to store Wikipedia articles using git as a backend: <https://github.com/scy/levitation>.
In Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help WikipediaI was thinking that an interface that colored content based on how old it was would be pretty cool. Then I realized that, duh, a SCM style blame function would be cool for wikipedia (which may be available in the diff functionality, I don't remember or use the history diffing ability on wikipedia enough to know off hand). Then I thought, it would be nice to have wikipedia content in SCM anyway, and was thinking of writing something to import it into git.
And it may already exist. A search turned up http://scytale.name/blog/2009/11/announcing-levitation and the code is at https://github.com/scy/levitation
In The Wikipedia war over Paul RevereThey advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".
Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.
Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: https://github.com/scy/levitation
In Who Writes Wikipedia?