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.
--
Bård Dahlmo