Is there a nice way to distribute a database across many systems? Would this be useful for a data-set like Wikipedia? It would be really nice if anyone could

Is there a nice way to distribute a database across many systems? Would this be useful for a data-set like Wikipedia? It would be really nice if anyone could easily follow Wikipedia in such a way that anyone could fork it, and merge some changes, but not others, etc. This is something that really needs to happen for large, distributed data-sets. I really want to see large corpuses of data that can have a ton of contributors sending pull requests to build out some great collaborative bastion of knowledge.