Anthony DiPierro wrote:
This is the reason I think a more P2P based network would be such a great solution for the long-term. People wouldn't need to donate cash to cover operating "costs".
Anthony
I know this belongs on the technical mailing list, but I would like to get more involved with at least some experimental Wikipedia data servers that use the P2P approach for distribution of content. Are there some forums, talk pages, or developer groups that are working to develop this concept?
I found http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/P2P but there are certainly other that may be useful.
The #1 problem I see with most current P2P networks is that they are anti-wiki and are only useful for spreading content. Editing content and pushing the edits back to a central repository goes beyond the current P2P topology and would have to be a key component to a MediaWiki P2P edition. I guess I'm asking for a Wikiproject type thing to get started to discuss this issue, but realize that there are so many forums to discuss something like this that trying to pick out one place to make a discussion of this nature can be difficult.
There would still be a need to cover some basic "operating costs", but we could perhaps cut some of the server growth down quite a bit through alternative technologies, reducing bandwidth to a higher percentage of actual content instead of navigational queries. It would also help reduce effects of server overloading, and have a side benefit to transmit information to places like China where it would work around official censorship.