For 99.9% of the users 99.9% of the time you are exactly correct. The
discussion of Gnutella and P2P came up in the context of the major
"bandwidth stealers" who were downloading the entire site one page at a
time, and were taking images on an as needed basis. Using Gnutella or
BitTorrent to distribute a big zip file with all the images in it at once
would solve this very specific issue.
If, as others have said, bandwidth isn't a scarce resource, then this is
probably not an idea that should be implemented any time soon.
-Kelly
At 07:51 AM 3/18/2004, you wrote:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see
*any* practical benefits to
this whatsoever. What are we trying to accomplish? Anyone who uses
gnutella can fire up a web browser and browse the site; our articles are
tiny, and don't even begin to approach the size where there is tangible
benefit from distributing them peer-to-peer. Finally - do we really want
to pollute the p2p network(s) with horrendously outdated versions of
articles (since this is inevitably what would happen)?
Not to mention what the evil users can do: pack the trendy variant of
Bagle/[insert virus name here] as "Wikipedia - <Legit article
name>.pdf.scr", and start distributing all sorts of crap bearing the
project name. Of course, one can argue that these people can already do so
now: but remember, right now, we're not endorsing p2p as an official
distribution channel of any type. The moment we start to is the moment
when this type of flagrant abuse becomes unstoppable, because a user
(especially if clueless) cannot tell whether an article he's getting is
John Doe's POV wrapped in a Wikipedia header, a virus, or a legit article.
What's, ideally, the benefit? And how does it surpass normal browsing?
Cheers,
-IK
Jimmy Wales wrote:
There have been proposals, which I
enthusiastically support, that we
should in some organized and sensible fashion try to share our
articles on Gnutella networks. [...]
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