Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent

[mafintosh]

Author here. If anyone is interested I presented this at jsconf.eu last year as part of a BitTorrent talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTCsSwCpGP8 (slides: http://mafintosh.github.io/slides/jsconf-2014/jsconf-eu-2014...)

[wongarsu]

What are the obstacles to running this client-side in the browser? That would lower the barrier to entry for users by a lot.

Edit: I just finished watching your talk where you mention that https://github.com/feross/webtorrent is already doing that.

[freeall]

The idea is to showcase how a large dataset is pretty good at being shared without having central servers. Here using bittorrent.

mafintosh showed how wikipedia could be shared without a central server(s), and instead rely on a network of peers.

subtack did something similar, peermaps, which is a showcase on how you can share geo data over bittorrent. Imagine a google maps without a google servers. https://github.com/substack/peermaps

Of course there's many unsolved questions, like "how do you update?", "how do you manage the data?", etc. But the examples are pretty solid.

[sdfjkl]

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

[CHY872]

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.

[belorn]

Can an observer watch what pages people read?

[higherpurpose]

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-...

[freeall]

Closed source?

[mizzao]

A Wikipedia hosted in a decentralized manner (i.e. DHT on running computers) that could still be updated in a distributed fashion would really help us maintain that knowledge for the future while not relying Wikimedia's servers to keep running.

[AndrewDucker]

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

[murbard2]

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.

[sleepychu]

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

[tormeh]

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.

[jekrb]

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.

[madsravn]

I don't think it is so much a question about why. More that is pretty cool idea.

[known]

Interesting project.