Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobile data charges

Re:Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobi... by yosamino on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @03:23PM (#13767926)

Well, I don't know anything at all about wikimedia infrastructure, but I would think it caches rather well.

Then all the ISP would have to do is coordinate with wikimedia to put such a device in their datacenter and save a lot on that precious upstream bandwith, keeping traffic on their local network where it's not costing them as much.

That's a plus, in addition to the free karma.

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Re:Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobi... by ikeboy on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @03:31PM (#13768012)

Problem is there are updates every day. The dump is only good if you don't need the latest page.

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Re:Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobi... by yosamino on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @05:22PM (#13769125)

That's why I wrote cache.

I would imagine that on average a page is retrieved more than it's edited. So even even in the case of poplar pages, there is potential for saving bandwidth.

But I don't know the actual statistics for wikipedia.

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Re:Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobi... by tommorris on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @05:56PM (#13769409)

For Wikipedia, if you aren't logged in (with an editor's account etc.) you are hitting a cache most of the time.

And it isn't so much for the bandwidth saving, more the saving in CPU time in rendering the page up from the Wikitext source, which can be substantial. Some very big pages used to take 2-3 minutes to render because Wikitext is a rather slow ugly programming language pretending to be a document format. (A lot has been sped up after a lot of the rendering guts got moved to Lua.)

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