A Distributed Wiki System Based on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Principles

In peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, each peer maintains its own repository, publishing files, downloading files from others, and making its own files available for download. We present P2Pedia, a distributed wiki system applying these principles to collaborative editing of documents: contributors may maintain their own version of each document, while accessing and reusing the contributions of others. This collaboration model, by allowing for multiple versions of a document, generates a different type of versioning hierarchy, and changes the semantics of wikilinks. We show how the versioning hierarchy of documents and the wikilinks create a graph of documents, that can be searched using an existing file-sharing infrastructure, and we propose some trust indicators to help users choose between available search results. Finally, we present the design and implementation of P2Pedia, and propose some scenarios where our proposed collaboration model is most appropriate.