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Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

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Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#11

Post by xnyhps »

CHY872 wrote: post #3
sdfjkl wrote: post #2

This README is a bit short on telling what it actually does. Anyone?

Pretty sure that it's: When you want to go on a wikipedia article, it requests the file from other peers in the network using the bittorrent protocol. It's a copy of Wikipedia placed on bittorrent, presumably with some semantics for article updates.

It looks like it uses a single Wikipedia dump from over a year ago. Would be cool if it supported deltas somehow, so the network doesn't split when a new dump is used.

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#12

Post by hnyc »

tormeh wrote: post #5
sleepychu wrote: post #4

Why? Specifically - why would I choose to browse this way over just accessing wikipedia?

You wouldn't ask if you lived in China. Though bittorrent traffic may need to be disguised. Decentralising the internet is generally a great idea.

Then take a look at Freenet. :P

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#13

Post by higherpurpose »

freeall wrote: post #10
higherpurpose wrote: post #8

Is this like Popcorn Time for Wikipedia? I think Bittorrent is also working on a similar project for the whole web, called Maelstrom: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-...

Closed source?

I think so, yes.

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#14

Post by jekrb »

sleepychu wrote: post #4

Why? Specifically - why would I choose to browse this way over just accessing wikipedia?

This is just one answer. You know how Wikipedia is always asking for donations (and rightfully so)? Part of those donations go to paying server cost.

Well, this cuts the server cost by decentralizing their content.

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#16

Post by kancer »

tormeh wrote: post #5
sleepychu wrote: post #4

Why? Specifically - why would I choose to browse this way over just accessing wikipedia?

You wouldn't ask if you lived in China. Though bittorrent traffic may need to be disguised. Decentralising the internet is generally a great idea.

An interesting point here is that Wikipedia actually works in China, only some articles are censored. I tried to bypass this by typing https://www.wikipedia.org into the browser, but it loaded the http version regardless.

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#18

Post by murbard2 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #17

Would a blockchain-like solution work here? Where new edits piled up on top of the existing data, constantly sharing it across all servers?

It could but it would be an unnecessary hurdle, because there is no need for a global consensus on a single version of the encyclopedia. Think of it as a git tree, and checkout the branch you like. With a currency, it's imperative that everyone refers to the same branch all the time, not so with an encyclopedia.

In practice there would be a few "popular" branches, and one would likely dominate, so that it would be trivial to identify it by relying on a social consensus.

Using a blockchain when what you need is a distributed database is overkill.

Re: Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

#20

Post by placeybordeaux »

freeall wrote: post #10
higherpurpose wrote: post #8

Is this like Popcorn Time for Wikipedia? I think Bittorrent is also working on a similar project for the whole web, called Maelstrom: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-...

Closed source?

Seems like bittorrent foundation has been doing a lot of closed work source ever since bittorrent has been used across the world and they got very little money out of it.

Just my drive by judgement.

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