To the best of my knowledge, the two leading candidate technologies for a decentralized Wikipedia - git and blockchain - would both not scale to Wikipedia's requirements.
(But I am not an expert in distributed technologies, merely looked into these two for exactly this use case.) On Sep 23, 2015 4:59 AM, "Tomasz Ganicz" polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Many years ago, there was an idea to organize Wikipedia in usenet/nntp style (i.e. multiple servers conected via a dedicated protocol, and one can set up another one if he/she has enough resources and skills) - but I guess it would very hard to organize, as it all need to be live-synchronized. In usenet - texts are created by single person and only once, and then sent to relevant group, and then it is distributed to all servers and users who subscribe this group. In Wikipedia - any article can be edited by anyone at any time, and readers are interested in the final result which the effect of collaborative writing. Otherwise there will be various article versions splited across various servers.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
2015-09-23 10:41 GMT+02:00 Erik Aas esraiak@gmail.com:
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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe