Andy Spencer wrote:
This would be done in a way analogous projects such as SETI@home, where anyone with access to a server could install a client and host data.
There is very little analogy between your suggestion and SETI@home (or Folding@home or distributed.net or any other distributed computing project). Those distribute only CPU usage (and possibly RAM), but not bandwidth usage.
Your idea necessitates that users (who are trying to read an article) would be redirected to some random volunteer computer that is running an HTTP daemon. But what do you do when it goes down? The central server that does the redirecting would take a while to determine that you are down, and until then, would continue to redirect requests to it. Wikipedia would become very unreliable.
I do however have access to a server that's using roughly 0.5% it's CPU and 1.5% of it's allocated bandwidth and would be more than willing to contribute those resources if it were possible.
You may consider donating the CPU to a distributed computing project of your choice. As for the bandwidth, I'm sure there are services on the net that are trying hard to find people to mirror their large files (download sites, for example).
Timwi