Stephen Forrest wrote:
Wikipedia is different from Amazon and ebay in that it is possible to download its entire content in a single compressed bundle (or a small set of these, one for each wiki). Presumably some way can be found to section off the bandwidth consumed by downloading these bundles from the bandwidth used for reading and editing the online version (i.e. have a host of mirrors only for these downloads).
I've been wondering if perhaps setting up a bit torrent tracker for Wikipedia database downloads might be a good idea. I don't know how many people download those things; if it's only a couple of downloads a week it might not be worthwhile, but if there are lots of downloads a day then it could save the project a lot of bandwidth.