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.