
Ask HN: Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to host Wikipedia on a P2P network? - Crazyontap
Wikipedia is always asking for donations and I&#x27;m guessing most of it would be to handle their massive hosting and bandwidth bills (?)<p>So wouldn&#x27;t it make sense to ask people to donate their CPU &#x2F; bandwidth as compared to money?<p>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)<p>This would make hosting practically free and redundant.<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the first person to think off this? Why isn&#x27;t it a good idea?
======
algaeontoast
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/](https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

------
rubinelli
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.

~~~
Crazyontap
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.

