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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 3:32 AM, mike <emesee3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> also
>
>  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#P2_Peerpedia
>
>  & along with that...
>
>  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/P2P

I've since noted a very interesting little link: 'GitTorrent' at
http://gittorrent.utsl.gen.nz/rfc.html

The abstract:

"This document describes the GitTorrent Protocol version 0.1, referred
to as "GTP/0.1". The GitTorrent Protocol (GTP) is a protocol for
collaborative git repository distribution across the Internet. It is
best classified as a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, although it also
contains centralized elements.

Git is a decentralized version control system (VCS) created in the
beginning of 2005 by Linus Torvalds. To date only client-server based
distribution has been supported. Although git is already able to
densely exchange updates between repositories and thereby minimize the
overall resource requirements for distribution, this will occasionally
involve clients cloning a complete repository. This places much strain
on sites hosting many git repositories in terms of request-processing
and sheer bandwidth. It is the goal of GTP to facilitate such hosting
sites in reducing resource demands by using P2P distribution.

Normally a client does not use their upload capacity while downloading
a repository. The GTP approach capitalizes on this fact by having
clients upload bits of the repository data to each other. In
comparison to the original client-server distribution, this adds huge
scalability and cost-management advantages. People can set up
"mirrors" of torrents, and have them advertised with less
administration and more convenience to the user than setting up a
regular mirror."

--
gwern