On Mon, 14 Apr 2008, MinuteElectron wrote:
The image dumps were available via bit torrent for a while, but are gone again last I checked. Was there a particular reason why bit torrent was used in that case? Image dumps have been unavailable for many years now so I assume there's some barrier to providing them in the same way as other parts of Wikipedia.
The image dumps are unofficial and are so large that very few people can source them in their entirety, at least to more than a few people. So in this case bittorent was useful since it meant that the burden of hosting such massive files that potentially many people would want was distributed.
Some weeks ago I downloaded the enwiki dump and set up a torrent and started seeding after being asked to do that on IRC.
The person requesting it said he had trouble downloading large files due to unstable internet connection. Using bittorent was better, as it has builtin support for partial downloads.
Today I stopped seeding (as a new dump was available). I guess I ended up seeding about 30 gigs so some 30 people downloaded the dump using bittorrent.