Distributed Wikipedia Project

From Wikiteer

The Distributed Wikipedia Project goal is to solve the current crises of ever growing bandwidth and server cost of the Wikimedia Foundation for hosting the ever growing Wikipedia and related projects. In the current model the WMF runs a centralized database on a serverfarm in Florida and some squid/cache servers in Paris, in the Netherlands (Kennisnet) and elsewhere. This model seems not to scale very well.

A (totally) distributed approach to Wikipedia and related projects might solve that problem (and create a few others). This projectpage intents to organize efforts to create such an approach.

The idea: reclaim the World Wide Web for starters

Currently contributers of encyclopedic content to Wikipedia submit their articles to a centralized server owned and run by the Wikimedia Foundation. They could just as well post the article in html-format to their homepage with their own ISP. A previous version of this page for example is on the homepage Dedalus, linking back to his project page. I belief that that could be done with any Wikipedia article and having the blue underlined so called wikis be transformed in real url's to other articles on homepages of other contributors. So, how do you edit such a page? What about versioning? That amounts to submitting a new version, right as it is now, but not to a centralized server, but to (another) homepage. That would require a clever mechanism to secure that a link to the original article now will point to the updated article on another site. Anyone any idea how to solve that problem?

Participants

(feel free to add your name, and a link to your homepage)
Dedalus = Dedalus 14:44, 29 December 2006 (EST)