On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, What we need is a database with a robust and fool proof synchronisation process. Latency is important when all the databases have to be synchronised all the time. When articles only need to be the latest when they are readied for editing it is less of an issue.
When the data is shared over many computers in for instance a peer to peer network, the real cost can be high but when the cost is shared by volunteers and organisations volunteering it is no longer much of an issue for the central organisation.
Databases of such a design are not that rare. There has been research on this for Wikipedia usage in Amsterdam where it is considered feasible. Thanks, Gerard
On 23 January 2012 18:48, Leslie Carr lcarr@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 9:38 AM, cyrano cyrano.fawkes@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, this topic is from foundation-l, I think it is more suited on wikitech-l.
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What about sharing the whole databases among the millions of users, in some p2p net with a lot of redundancies?, something like a dense, cloudy internet of databases who remains whole even if it looses part of itself? Does it sound unwordly? It could be a good complement to the server based versions.
this sounds nice but just wouldn't work at all. we need to have reliable databases with a consistant latency.
Le 22/01/2012 20:50, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen a écrit :
The simple option that will just blow all this talk fo lobbying away, is to migrate outside US jurisdiction entirely. It does entail some costs, and may well not be optimal, on many fronts.
s/some/lots of/
A medium option is to do a plan on the lines of the actions that Google has already put into force, of diversifying datacenters that have our non-fungible assets, so that for enforcement they would have to invade sovreign territory. But for a non-profit, our best line would be to say that we are making those plans, but actually want to keep the US have the PR benefit of being able to say that WMF like entities find the US best to be incorporated in. And then grin very hard, so they know we mean business. Follow up with saying the very real contingency plans can not wait on their realizing they have the wrong end of the stick, so we have to act now.
So we will put a few fallback datacenters elsewhere, just so our various communities and chapters realize we aren't going to be bullied by US jurisdiction. But we have a much more expansive plan which we tell we will eventually realize. But the legislators in the US have to understand we are doing this all so they realize what they are working on is harmful to prosperity around the globe.
again, expensive!
And if they play ball, (we won't give a cent of tribute, sorry) we will not accelerate the rate at which we realize the full international nature of the Wikimedia Foundation.
That is pretty much the line of "education" that might be effective, without costing the Foundation a single backhander.
Byzantine fault tolerance and proving provenance of the data are major issues with distributed peer-to-peer systems; we have bad enough problems with vandals now, without cloudsourcing our database storage mechanisms...
Today, this is a computer science solution, not an operations solution. The Foundation doesn't exist to be a testbed for making computer science technology operationally mature.