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@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