Hi Erik,
If you compare the annual reports by the Wikimedia Foundation of
donated funds against the basic annual cost of running the servers,
these are only a tiny fraction of the total. There's no lack of
funding for the basics, so this is not a risk at the moment.
A closely related discussion has been a global crowd-sourced form of
creating multiply redundant snapshots of all our data, especially of
all the images on Wikimedia Commons. If, say, America was knocked
off-line one day due to meteor strike or the zombie apocalypse, the
rest of us in our post-apocalyptic Europe could easily recreate the
projects on new emergency servers. Probably in Germany ;-) This is an
easier proposition than maintaining a live "mirror". Note that small
portable versions of the text of Wikipedia exist, the idea being that
you can take it as a reference work when you are offline and not need
any special kit.
Fae
On 23 September 2015 at 09:41, Erik Aas <esraiak(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
responsible for storing that article.
Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
Best,
Erik
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae