Bryan Derksen wrote:
The image dumps were available via bit torrent for a while, but are gone again last I checked. Was there a particular reason why bit torrent was used in that case? Image dumps have been unavailable for many years now so I assume there's some barrier to providing them in the same way as other parts of Wikipedia.
The image dumps are unofficial and are so large that very few people can source them in their entirety, at least to more than a few people. So in this case bittorent was useful since it meant that the burden of hosting such massive files that potentially many people would want was distributed. It would be nice for Wikimedia to provide these in an official way, at least a seed and tracker of some sort, but there are still some technical problems to get around regarding image dumps made by the servers themselves (the current image dumps are made by downloading every single image file from the wiki being harvested from).
It should also be noted that at the moment there isn't anyone (to my knowledge) who is making the image dumps so they are going to be stale anyway.
MinuteElectron.