Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
Hi.
I know ideas for a distributed Wikipedia have been discussed here
before, but I
haven't seen the following angle before (this may
just be because I
don't read
my mail carefully enough of course):
Let's say you have 10 Wikipedia servers. All of them dispense
articles for
reading directly. When an article is about to be
edited, the title is
hashed,
and the corresponding server is contacted.
That way, each article "belongs" on one of X server, so a lot of
consistency
problems disappear. That server can again notify the
others about
changes in
its "own" articles.
If a server goes down, it's not the end of the world, an Xth of the
articles
aren't editable for a while. The downed
server's "lease" can be
revoked after
an hour, perhaps.
While I don't have the capacity to implement this myself (just
fending off the
"send patches"), it doesn't appear to be
such a gigantic departure
from the
existing system. (Yes, big. But not rewrite.)
This sounds like a good idea, but we have two servers. Are you
offering to donate the other 8?
Wouldn't it be worth looking into? It seems
increased demand eats up
every
regular measure taken (kind of like congested highways
becoming even
more
congested when they're expanded).
We have a dirt road. When we start building the highway, we can talk
about onramps.
-- Tim Starling <../t/starling/physics/unimelb/edu/au>