I recently read a paper in ACM WikiSym 2007 on Distributed Peer-to-Peer Wiki Network*. The idea was interesting as the present wikis follow centralized client-server architecture and some organization (e.g. Wikimedia foundation for Wikipedia) is in control of all the data on wiki which means a central point of failure.
The popularity of peer to peer file sharing networks suggests that wikis can also be implemented as peer-to peer networks. This also gives users ability to develop custom frontends and the freedom to present articles in a more content friendly format.
The downside is that a separate application will be required to access or upload data on such a wiki and concurrent versioning issues need to be addressed.
A working prototype was developed by the authors of the paper and it still has to go a long way before it becomes feasible for real world implementation. The concept of peer to peer hypertext has also been suggested to implement peer to peer wikis. But anyway it seems a solution to huge costs of maintaining a large centralized wiki like Wikipedia.
*Morris, J., Luer, C., “Distriwiki: a distributed peer to peer wiki network”, Proceedings of ACM WikiSym, 69-74(2007)
1 comment:
Peer to peer network is so good to transfer things. Make good use of those idle resources through the network. It's also very useful to maintain shared small size of files with each other, one reason is that your friends could keep those data for you. But as a huge database, I think there might be issues to protect the data security through this sharing way.
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