Thanks for this initiative. I think that concerns at the moment would be in the domains of privacy, security, lack of WMF analytics intstrumentation, and WMF fundraising limitations.
That said, looking in the longer term, a number of us in the community are interested in decreasing our dependencies on the Wikimedia Foundation as insurance against possible catastrophes and as a backup plan in case of another significant WMF dispute with the community. It might be worth exploring the options for setting up Wikipedia on infrastructure outside of WMF. I would be interested in talking with you to discuss this further; please let me know if you have time for a Hangout session in early to mid December. Thank you for your interest! Pine On Nov 27, 2015 10:50 PM, "Yeongjin Jang" <yeongjinjangg...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I am Yeongjin Jang, a Ph.D. Student at Georgia Tech. > > In our lab (SSLab, https://sslab.gtisc.gatech.edu/), > we are working on a project called B2BWiki, > which enables users to share the contents of Wikipedia through WebRTC > (peer-to-peer sharing). > > Website is at here: http://b2bwiki.cc.gatech.edu/ > > The project aims to help Wikipedia by donating computing resources > from the community; users can donate their traffic (by P2P communication) > and storage (indexedDB) to reduce the load of Wikipedia servers. > For larger organizations, e.g. schools or companies that > have many local users, they can donate a mirror server > similar to GNU FTP servers, which can bootstrap peer sharing. > > > Potential benefits that we think of are following. > 1) Users can easily donate their resources to the community. > Just visit the website. > > 2) Users can get performance benefit if a page is loaded from > multiple local peers / local mirror (page load time got faster!). > > 3) Wikipedia can reduce its server workload, network traffic, etc. > > 4) Local network operators can reduce network traffic transit > (e.g. cost that is caused by delivering the traffic to the outside). > > > While we are working on enhancing the implementation, > we would like to ask the opinions from actual developers of Wikipedia. > For example, we want to know whether our direction is correct or not > (will it actually reduce the load?), or if there are some other concerns > that we missed, that can potentially prevent this system from > working as intended. We really want to do somewhat meaningful work > that actually helps run Wikipedia! > > Please feel free to give as any suggestions, comments, etc. > If you want to express your opinion privately, > please contact ss...@cc.gatech.edu. > > Thanks, > > --- Appendix --- > > I added some detailed information about B2BWiki in the following. > > # Accessing data > When accessing a page on B2BWiki, the browser will query peers first. > 1) If there exist peers that hold the contents, peer to peer download > happens. > 2) otherwise, if there is no peer, client will download the content > from the mirror server. > 3) If mirror server does not have the content, it downloads from > Wikipedia server (1 access per first download, and update). > > > # Peer lookup > To enable content lookup for peers, > we manage a lookup server that holds a page_name-to-peer map. > A client (a user's browser) can query the list of peers that > currently hold the content, and select the peer by its freshness > (has hash/timestamp of the content, > has top 2 octet of IP address > (figuring out whether it is local peer or not), etc. > > > # Update, and integrity check > Mirror server updates its content per each day > (can be configured to update per each hour, etc). > Update check is done by using If-Modified-Since header from Wikipedia > server. > On retrieving the content from Wikipedia, the mirror server stamps a > timestamp > and sha1 checksum, to ensure the freshness of data and its integrity. > When clients lookup and download the content from the peers, > client will compare the sha1 checksum of data > with the checksum from lookup server. > > In this settings, users can get older data > (they can configure how to tolerate the freshness of data, > e.g. 1day older, 3day, 1 week older, etc.), and > the integrity is guaranteed by mirror/lookup server. > > > More detailed information can be obtained from the following website. > > http://goo.gl/pSNrjR > (URL redirects to SSLab@gatech website) > > Please feel free to give as any suggestions, comments, etc. > > Thanks, > -- > Yeongjin Jang > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
