Good observation, but I just want to point out that the full dumps are downloade...

cdash · on Nov 26, 2013

They could set up a torrent as well and almost assuredly people will seed it full time on servers.

rakoo · on Nov 26, 2013

There is a torrent distribution channel: see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents

However it suffers the number one torrent issue: they do not tolerate change. This means that

- When an article changes, you need to generate a new torrent - When a new torrent describes the archive, it needs to be downloaded from scratch by all peers, so that the maximum number of peers are available for a newcomer.

I hope you'll understand that this is not the official way to distribute archives...

gnosygnu · on Nov 26, 2013

Yeah, but they're working on incremental updates, so this should make the "from scratch" part much easier. You can look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Incremental_dumps and http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2013-Aug... if you're interested.