Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Gerard Meijssen 
Hoi,
At the time Andrew S. Tanenbaum had a working model for decentralised
Wikipedia. This model was taken through its paces using models specifically
created for its type of use. The WMF was not able, willing, never mind to
provide traffic data to fine tune the model.

It would scale.
Thanks,
GerardM

On 23 September 2015 at 10:41, Erik Aas  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>
> Best,
> Erik
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Denny Vrandecic 
To the best of my knowledge, the two leading candidate technologies for a
decentralized Wikipedia - git and blockchain - would both not scale to
Wikipedia's requirements.

(But I am not an expert in distributed technologies, merely looked into
these two for exactly this use case.)
On Sep 23, 2015 4:59 AM, "Tomasz Ganicz"  wrote:

> Many years ago, there was an idea to organize Wikipedia in usenet/nntp
> style (i.e. multiple servers conected via a dedicated protocol, and one can
> set up another one if he/she has enough resources and skills) - but I guess
> it would very hard to organize, as it all need to be live-synchronized. In
> usenet - texts are created by single person and only once, and then sent to
> relevant group, and then it is distributed to all servers and users who
> subscribe this group. In Wikipedia - any article can be edited by anyone at
> any time, and readers are interested in the final result which the effect
> of collaborative writing. Otherwise there will be various article versions
> splited across various servers.
>
> See:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
>
>
>
> 2015-09-23 10:41 GMT+02:00 Erik Aas :
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> > and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> > the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> > Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> > if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
> >
> > Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> > store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> > an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When
> an
> > article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are
> online)
> > responsible for storing that article.
> >
> > Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
> >
> > Best,
> > Erik
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
>
>
>
>
> --
> Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
> http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
> http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
> http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz
> ___
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> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] next Wikidata office hour

2015-09-23 Thread Lydia Pintscher 
On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 12:34 PM, Lydia Pintscher
 wrote:
> Hey everyone :)
>
> We'll be doing the next Wikidata office hour on September 23rd at
> 17:00 UTC. See 
> http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=17&min=00&sec=0&day=23&month=09&year=2015
> for your timezone. We'll be meeting in #wikimedia-office on Freenode
> IRC.
>
> As usual I'll start with an overview of what's been happening around
> Wikidata since the last office hour and then we'll have time for
> questions and discussions.
>
> If there is a particular topic you'd like to have on the agenda please
> let me know.

A quick reminder that this is happening in 2h and 45 minutes. See you there! :)


Cheers
Lydia

-- 
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Tomasz Ganicz 
Many years ago, there was an idea to organize Wikipedia in usenet/nntp
style (i.e. multiple servers conected via a dedicated protocol, and one can
set up another one if he/she has enough resources and skills) - but I guess
it would very hard to organize, as it all need to be live-synchronized. In
usenet - texts are created by single person and only once, and then sent to
relevant group, and then it is distributed to all servers and users who
subscribe this group. In Wikipedia - any article can be edited by anyone at
any time, and readers are interested in the final result which the effect
of collaborative writing. Otherwise there will be various article versions
splited across various servers.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet



2015-09-23 10:41 GMT+02:00 Erik Aas :

> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>
> Best,
> Erik
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 




-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Fæ 
Hi Erik,

If you compare the annual reports by the Wikimedia Foundation of
donated funds against the basic annual cost of running the servers,
these are only a tiny fraction of the total. There's no lack of
funding for the basics, so this is not a risk at the moment.

A closely related discussion has been a global crowd-sourced form of
creating multiply redundant snapshots of all our data, especially of
all the images on Wikimedia Commons. If, say, America was knocked
off-line one day due to meteor strike or the zombie apocalypse, the
rest of us in our post-apocalyptic Europe could easily recreate the
projects on new emergency servers. Probably in Germany ;-) This is an
easier proposition than maintaining a live "mirror". Note that small
portable versions of the text of Wikipedia exist, the idea being that
you can take it as a reference work when you are offline and not need
any special kit.

Fae


On 23 September 2015 at 09:41, Erik Aas  wrote:
> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>
> Best,
> Erik

-- 
fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Edward Saperia 
Hi Erik,

This might be interesting to you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals

*Edward Saperia*
Founder Newspeak House 
email  • facebook  •
 twitter  • 07796955572
133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

On 23 September 2015 at 09:41, Erik Aas  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>
> Best,
> Erik
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Pierre-Selim 
2015-09-23 10:41 GMT+02:00 Erik Aas :

> Hello,
>
> this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
> and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
> the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
> Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
> if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.
>
> Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
> store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
> an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
> article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
> responsible for storing that article.
>
> Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?
>

Basically you would like Wikipedia to work as git works for source code ?

I guess it's feasible given enought ressources. However I think it's not
gonna be ready anytime soon :)


>
> Best,
> Erik
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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> 




-- 
Pierre-Selim
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[Wikimedia-l] Decentralised Wikipedia

2015-09-23 Thread Erik Aas 
Hello,

this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project
and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of
the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success.
Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder
if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised.

Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would
store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit
an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an
article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online)
responsible for storing that article.

Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible?

Best,
Erik
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