----- Original Message -----
From: "Timwi" <timwi(a)gmx.net>
To: <wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 10:26 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Gnutella
Itai Fiat wrote:
> This my first post to wikitech-l (yay!), and a presumptuous one at that.
I
> recently had an idea, and have written an written
a short (the frame of
> reference being the Magna Carta) article describing it at
>
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella (for confusion’s sake, the
content
of the article
will not be recounted here).
Both this article you wrote, and this mailing list message you wrote,
are pretty weird.
Not to worry. If you read between the lines, or every third line, you'll get
it eventually.
What is this about? What is it for? Why are you
trying
to sound like a mediocre comedian?
Well, I am a mediocre comedian. As to the first two questions, I suppose I
could provide a better answer. (Indeed, already have.) It is not entirely
impossible to modify an existing, GPL Gnutella client (there is no shortage
of the like) to serve Wikipedia articles (dynamically generated from the
MySQL database, very much like MediaWiki and Apache do for HTTP requests)
over Gnutella. Imagine saving all existing Wikipedia articles into a single
directory and then sharing them using a client of your choice. That should
answer the first question. As for what is it for, that's something I did my
best to answer in the Meta article. A far more interesting question is
whether this should (assuming I can get the "can" worked out) be
implemented. As the propagator of this idea, I obviously believe it should,
but it would be nice to know I have some backing before plunging into
development.
-- Itai