Hi,
There hasn't been a successful pages-meta-history.xml.bz2 or pages-meta-history.xml.7z dump from the http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/ site in the last 5 dumps. How is the new dump system coming along for these large wiki files? I personally am a bit concerned that these files haven't been available for ~4months at least, maybe publicize the problems to get more feedback on how to fix it instead of just telling us that: The current dump system is not sustainable on very large wikis and is being replaced. You'll hear about it when we have the new one in place. :)
-- brion
Sorry for complaining, but it has been a long time that this is broken, what are the details of the problem?
I hope you guys are planning on adding some way to download the wikimedia commons images too at some point, ie. I was thinking a multifile torrent could work, with images from enwiki in one file, and the other wikis in other files. Also the enwiki images could also be in subcategories of popularity based on access.log files, so a space restricted user might only download the folder labelled "top10percent" and then get the top ten percent most popular images in wikipedia, which could still make a pretty complete encyclopedia for most offline users and save 90% of the disk space. Creating a multifile torrent like this is standard, ie. if you download from piratebay you know what I mean. The only drawback with the torrents is the lack of geographical awareness for the data transfer as someone mentioned before, but I think the decentralized nature of bittorrent with many possible uploaders makes this irrelevant as wikimedia won't be paying for the bandwidth if other people choose to help seed the torrents anyway.
What about www.wikipirate.org or wikitorrent.org for a list of wikimedia torrents? :) both are available!
cheers, Jamie