Jeff Ferland wrote:
You'll need a quite impressive machine to host even just the current revisions of the wiki. Expect to expend 10s to even hundreds of gigabytes on the database alone for Wikipedia using only the current versions.
No, no, no. You're looking at it all wrong. That's the sucker's way of doing it.
If you're smart, you put up a simple page with a text box labeled "Wikipedia search", and whenever someone types a query into the box and submits it, you ship the query over to the Wikimedia servers, and then slurp back the response, and display it back to the original submitter. That way only Wikimedia has to worry about all those pesky gigabyte-level database hosting requirements, while you get all the glory.
This appears to be what the questioner is asking about.