
Peerwiki: all of Wikipedia on BitTorrent - galapago
https://github.com/mafintosh/peerwiki
======
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTCsSwCpGP8)
(slides: [http://mafintosh.github.io/slides/jsconf-2014/jsconf-
eu-2014...](http://mafintosh.github.io/slides/jsconf-2014/jsconf-
eu-2014.html))

~~~
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](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](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.

~~~
xnyhps
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.

~~~
placeybordeaux
Bittorrent doesn't have support for that, but you could publish torrents that
just host a full version of all the modified pages.

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belorn
Can an observer watch what pages people read?

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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-...](http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/10/project-maelstrom-the-internet-
we-build-next/)

~~~
freeall
Closed source?

~~~
higherpurpose
I think so, yes.

~~~
freeall
I wouldn't want something like this to be closed source. It's very important
that the security of the decentralization can be validated.

And in these NSA times it's even more important.

~~~
wongarsu
If the concept works well, an open source variant is sure to be created
precisely for this reason.

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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.

~~~
wongarsu
If you consider malicious actors
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-
term_abuse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse)), some
form of local consensus becomes necessary. In the real Wikipedia this is
handled by admin actions right now. And that's really the only workable system
I can come up with right now.

You could have different branches with different admin teams, but in a sense
we have that technology already: anybody can download an XML dump of the
Wikipedia database and set up their own Wikipedia clone with minimal effort.

~~~
murbard2
Yes, we do have that technology, yes it's Wikipedia, yes it can be
distributed, no that doesn't require a blockchain nor particularly benefit
from one.

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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.

~~~
kancer
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](https://www.wikipedia.org) into the browser, but
it loaded the http version regardless.

------
known
Interesting project.

