Wikipedia‘s content is created in a fully decentralized fashion by unpaid volunteers. However its IT infrastructure does not follow the same decentralized model and still follows a traditional architecture where the Wikimedia foundation owns all the machines necessary to host the website. The “Decentralized Wikipedia” project investigates how one might use computing resources provided by volunteers to host the Wikipedia content and reduce the load handled by the central infrastructure.
Main publications:
- Wikipedia Workload Analysis for decentralized Hosting. Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen. Elsevier Computer Networks 53(11), July 2009.
- A Survey of DHT Security Techniques. Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen. ACM Computing Surveys 43(2), January 2011.
- Collaborative Wikipedia Hosting. Guido Urdaneta. PHD thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, June 2011.