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 <[email protected]> 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 -- [email protected] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
