Decentralised Wikipedia - Wikimedia-l

Pierre-Selim

23 Sep 23 Sep

1:21 p.m.

2015-09-23 10:41 GMT+02:00 Erik Aas <esraiak(a)gmail.com>om>:

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?

Basically you would like Wikipedia to work as git works for source code ? I guess it's feasible given enought ressources. However I think it's not gonna be ready anytime soon :)

...

Best, Erik _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

-- Pierre-Selim

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Fæ

1:31 p.m.

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

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Denny Vrandecic

4:43 p.m.

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(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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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(a)gmail.com>om>:

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(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

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Kim Bruning

4 Jan 4 Jan

8:28 a.m.

Closest to what you're assking would be this new design for federated wiki by Ward Cunningham: http://fed.wiki.org/ (May still have some bugs.) No idea if realistic to convert. sincerely, Kim Bruning On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:41:27AM +0200, Erik Aas 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

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Gerard Meijssen

11:17 a.m.

Hoi, You can spend money only once. What a distributed Wikipedia brings is redundancy in a meaningful way. Anyone can provide some space and bandwidth in this way and when data is local, it means that the response time will be superior. When the data is not centrally maintained, it becomes hard to censor. When we are to keep the "community" healthy an infusion of money by not needing a centralised server farm means that we can spend money on community features like proper support for Wikisource or for a user interface that is as good as Reasonator for Wikidata. Business as usual does not mean that business as usual is optimal. Thanks, GerardM On 4 January 2016 at 07:43, Kevin Payravi <kevinpayravi(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Welcome to the list, Erik! This is my first post, too. I don't think the lack of funding for server maintenance is of concern at all, let alone a severe threat. The 2015-16 plan <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan> calls for $65 million in spending, with 40% going towards engineering (which in addition to the servers includes testing, improvements, updates, API work, and all that jazz). That leaves 60% going towards all the other stuff (management, legal, grants, HR, communications, etc.). Keeping the servers alive isn't a severe threat. The threat is keeping the Foundation and community healthy and active, and spending the money right to make that happen. Kevin Payravi W: www.kevinpayravi.com E: kevinpayravi(a)gmail.com P: (330) 554 - 3397 On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 2:28 AM, Kim Bruning <kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:

Closest to what you're assking would be this new design for federated wiki by Ward Cunningham: http://fed.wiki.org/ (May still have some bugs.) No idea if realistic to convert. sincerely, Kim Bruning On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:41:27AM +0200, Erik Aas 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines

Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,

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