Penny saved is penny earned : a peer-to-peer approach to alleviate costs of operating Wikipedia

• Main Author: Kansal, Sonakshi.
• Other Authors: Anwitaman Datta
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/40065
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A fundamental problem that confronts website hosting is to manage the expenses incurred in running servers and paying for bandwidth consumed by visitors. Large volumes of traffic slow down websites and often readers cannot access the content they requested. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, has more than 4 million registered users and is currently the 12th most popular website according to Alexa.com. However, it often runs into financial crunch because of its non-commercial nature and high demand. This project aims to address this problem by developing a peer to peer network which allows readers to exchange wikipedia pages directly from each other without having to visit caching servers and origin servers, thereby, resulting in cost reduction. The peer to peer network is accessed from within the popular Mozilla Firefox browser via a plug-in. The software adapts efficiently as visitors join and leave the system, and can answer queries even though the system is continuously changing.