[Foundation-l] Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

> # Try to keep everybody's repositories up to date. The problem here is that I don't know how much a day's worth of Recent Changes would be, even compressed and stored as minimal diffs, but I suspect the bandwidth cost would be prohibitive.

During the minute of 20:36 UTC, there were 220 edits (and deletions,
etc. that get logged in RC). The average change in size is at least
100, so the average diff must be more than that (to take into account
changes, rather than just additions/removals). So we're talking well
over 20MB a minute, that's over 300kB/s - I'd say that's prohibitive.
I haven't taken into account compression, but my estimate is very
conservative, so I expect it will still be prohibitive even compressed
(compression would become more effective the more edits you group
together - if you only update once every 5 minutes, say, rather than
in real time, it would be considerably more efficient, but still not
enough, I would think).