I'm sorry if my ignorance is showing here, but I went to both sourceforge and gnutella.com and I still don't have any idea what gnutella is, other than it's a peer to peer networking protocol for file sharing. In other words, I can't figure out why Gnutella is different from Ares, the old Napster, or Bittorrent from an architectural point of view.

I am more familiar with Bittorrent, which is very useful for distributing copies of very large files (which a pdf version of Wikipedia would certainly qualify as) without using hardly any bandwidth on the main server. It's very cool that way. Perhaps Gnutella is similarly cool, but I can't find a "what is Gnutella" web page.

Quoting: "The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source. A separate file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar system."

Would someone who is familiar with both Gnutella and Bittorrent tell me why using Bittorrent for such a project would be stupid? It would certainly use less of Wikipedia's already strained bandwidth.

-Kelly

At 04:10 PM 3/9/2004, you wrote:

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"IF" == Itai Fiat itai@mail.portland.co.uk writes:

IF> Hello, This my first post to wikitech-l (yay!), and a
IF> presumptuous one at that. I recently had an idea, and have
IF> written an written a short (the frame of reference being the
IF> Magna Carta) article describing it at
IF> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella (for confusions
IF> sake, the content of the article will not be recounted
IF> here). While I have no problem developing this myself, I was
IF> wondering if anybody has any objections - or, better yet,
IF> suggestions or cash - they'd like to contribute in advance.

So, I added comments on-site, but here's my feeling:

I think a p2p distribution mechanism for Wikipedia is an EXCELLENT idea. It would/could do a lot to lower the load on the main servers.

I also think that if I had a fancy new-generation p2p client, I'd make a go of re-distributing Wikipedia content. It would be a great way to promote my network, especially if it has support for in-network Websites (like Freenet does).

But I don't think this is core functionality for Wikimedia, and I doubt that it'll get a lot of support around here. I think probably the best idea is to download the database dumps, and maybe experiment from there.

You may want to shop this idea with one of the open source P2P network groups, to see what they think about it. Frankly, there's more benefit for a P2P network than there is to Wikipedia, so they'll probably be more interested.

Anyways, good idea. You're gonna need to stick with it to see it happen, though. The best ideas are like that.

~ESP

-- Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l