Wikipedia to host videos using BitTorrent

Do-it-yerself uncyclopedia Wikipedia has announced the launch of a pioneering BitTorrent-powered video streaming service on its website.

The BitTorrent protocol is synonymous in many people's minds with file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, whose founders are currently appealing a court ruling that they promoted the illegal sharing of copyright material.

But BitTorrent can be used in a number of ways to distribute data of many types around the internet. As an article on file-sharing news site TorrentFreak reports, the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is used by universities and big-name such as Facebook and Twitter to share data between servers.

BitTorrent has recently gained the ability to stream content via clients such as Tribler and uTorrent - but so far, few sites have taken the technology mainstream.

Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the encyclopedia's umbrella organisation, has found a novel way to cut the cost of hosting video content. Visitors will now share some of their bandwidth when they view Wikimedia Foundation's streaming video content using P2P-Next's BitTorrent client, Swarmplayer.

Announcing the move, the Wikimedia Foundation said: "Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships."

Wikipedia's system uses a combination of webseeds and BitTorrent peers to spread the load. High-priority sections, such as the start of the video, are pulled via traditional HTTP sources, while later segments are served via the BitTorrent protocol.

More than 6,000 videos are currently hosted on Wikimedia's servers. All are set to use the technology, which will also be employed on all new clips.

Swarmplayer is currently only available as a plugin for Firefox (though reports suggest it doesn't work too well with the version 4 betas). An Internet Explorer plug-in is expected in the next couple of days, and a Chrome version is promised soon.

Wikipedia Begins Testing an Article Rating Tool

Wikipedia is now running a limited test enabling readers and users to rate articles in some key aspects. This, Wikipedia believes will drive engagement and provide valuable and accurate feedback to developers.

The basic principle behind Wikipedia is that anyone can edit or add content. The idea, when the site first launched, was to give everyone a chance to add to the world's knowledge.

In time, the barrier for entry has risen. With the quality of the content improving and with fewer topics left uncovered, only a few core contributors now add a large amount of new content.

With the ratings system, regular users will have a simple way to get involved without too much hassle.

"The 'Article Feedback Tool' will allow any reader of an article to quickly and easily assess the sourcing, completeness, neutrality, and readability of a Wikipedia article on a five-point scale," Wikipedia writes on its Technical Blog.

"In addition to being a way to measure article quality for the Public Policy Initiative, we hope the Article Feedback Tool could be a way to increase reader engagement by seeking feedback from readers on how they view the article," the post explains.

"The tool should also give editors an easy way to see where an article needs improvement," it adds.

The Feedback tool allows a reader to rate an article on several key aspects: sources, completion, neutrality and readability. Each area will get a rating of one to five stars.

This way, you'll be able to get an idea of the quality of the article at a glimpse. This comes in handy for readers, they'll know much easier which articles to trust, but it also comes in very handy for the editors so they'll know which areas need work.

The tool is now in testing on a number of low-traffic WikiProject United States Public Policy articles. Depending on the results, you can expect some version of the tool to be rolled out widely. However, Wikipedia typically moves rather slowly, so don't expect to see the ratings system on regular articles any time soon.