Ask HN: Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to host Wikipedia on a P2P network? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to host Wikipedia on a P2P network?

2 pointsCrazyontap4 comments

Wikipedia is always asking for donations and I'm guessing most of it would be to handle their massive hosting and bandwidth bills (?)

So wouldn't it make sense to ask people to donate their CPU / bandwidth as compared to money?

A lot of people like myself will gladly install a Seti@home app that helps host it like a P2P network (there have been plenty of projects implementing decentralized hosting using browser extensions also)

This would make hosting practically free and redundant.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think off this? Why isn't it a good idea?

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This was actually one of the first proofs of concept for IPFS, a decentralized file hosting platform built by Juan Benet at of Protocol Labs.

https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

How would readers access Wikipedia in a P2P network? If they need to install a specialized piece of software, that goes against Wikipedia's goal to be as widely accessible as possible.

IDK but here is a thought. It can be a combination of something like DDNS/DyDns + a DHT like tracker.

So anytime a new person installs this wiki@home app it registers itself with this tracker along with the pages it hosts (i don't think it needs to host everything).

So if I make a lookup for say 'Geovani Faria da Silva' then the tracker send me to geovani.faria.da.silva.en.wikipedia.org which has A records for all the registered hosters for this page who can serve this request.

Of course it needs to be dynamic so that as hosters are added and removed the DDNS updates accordingly.

Don't know if it is practical, but then this is Hacker news and so I'm guessing there are people far more knowledgeable who may have more such ideas.

I don't think it will be long before Firefox is that 'specialized piece of software' needed. It always pays to think of how something could be possible in the future rather than why it can't work now.

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