As I have indicated in the past a team at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the team that includes Andrew Tannenbaum, has been working on creating a peer to peer MediaWiki. Their goal is to be able to support a Wiki like the English language Wikipedia. They have developed algorithms that should allow for the kind of issues like having the data close to the readers, propagating changes and conflict resolution to these changes. The problem they have faced that did not resolve itself is to get the traffic data that allows them to test their algorithms against the real world. In the pastI have tried to get people's attention to no avail. I think the VU is still interested, it would be cool if this serious attempt at a peer to peer Wikipedia would get at least attention. There are few people like Andrew Tannenbaum who could be trusted to understand the issues involved.

Hoi, The English Wikipedia is used all over the world; the districution of requests for content can be regional and in certain cases will prove to be regional. The chances of edit conflicts is of a different order in en.wikipedia. Wikileaks is unlikely to approximate the traffic we have in the English Wikipedia. You do not need to have all the data to evaluate the functionality that has been developed. But the data has to be statistically relevant enough to be able to understand the issues as they occur. My point is that the VU has a need for data and they have so far been ignored even though I made my attempts to get them connected. Thanks, GerardM

Can you please stop whining? We've been sending data to VU for ages. Anyway, I love p2p treads! -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

David Gerard wrote: The idea of P2P distribution is good. The idea of using Git for this is not. This is exactly what Git is *not* optimized for: lots of individual files with almost no relation to each other. The same reason you are advised to not use Git to version control your home directory. Git handles trees, not individual files. In a wiki like MediaWiki, each article has its own history and revision control. Merges to an article doesn't mean that the whole tree (many gigabytes big) must be handled in the same tree-wide commit. The user must be able to commit changes to the most recent revision of, for example, [[Los Angeles, California]], and push such commits while still holding an outdated revision of some unrelated article, like [[Comic opera]]. The rate of changes in en.Wikipedia can me measured in edits per second, and these edits are only related to each other (ancestor-descendant relationship) in each own article. To move to a model where the whole Wikipedia is a single repository with single tree-wide revisions would severely disrupt its efficiency. Ironically, the per-file revision control model employed by now-obsolescent VCSes like CVS and RCS would fit Wikipedia better than Git (emphasis on revision control *model*, not software). -- Juliano F. Ravasi ·· http://juliano.info/ 5105 46CC B2B7 F0CD 5F47 E740 72CA 54F4 DF37 9E96 "A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle." -- Erin Majors * NOTE: Don't try to reach me through this address, use "contact@" instead. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l