I2p has some central services in its decentralised structure and that has caused problems in the past. An example is the wiki that is/was operated by ugha. That was gone it seems but is back again. Some observations …

When searching for information wikis often are important sources. On I2P the wiki operated by ugha was such a source. Now this wiki was reported down after the end of May 2015 and people had worries how to save the information contained there. A new wiki was created and the migration to that by restoring old information is currently in progress.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a message that Ugha’s wiki would be back. So I went there to see if there is any news about the downtime. I didn’t find any and in some commentary someone assumed it migt be running on an unobserved server. That wouldn’t quite explain the dis- and reappearance, though. Looking at the again-available wiki I then came across its status-page. At the time of writing this contained:

Pages Stats:
Date 	Views/day 	Edits/day
2015-10-31 	8.3 	0.0
2015-10-28 	2.0 	0.0
2015-10-26 	1.5 	0.0
2015-10-23 	6.0 	0.0
2015-10-21 	0.0 	0.0
2015-10-18 	4.3 	0.0
2015-10-16 	9.0 	0.0
2015-10-13 	16.0 	0.0
2015-10-11 	34.5 	0.0
2015-10-08 	5.3 	0.0
2015-10-06 	9.0 	0.0
2015-10-03 	7.0 	0.0
2015-10-01 	5.5 	0.0
2015-09-28 	22.7 	0.0
2015-09-26 	43.5 	0.0
2015-09-23 	8.7 	0.0
2015-09-20 	8.3 	0.0
2015-09-18 	60.5 	0.0
2015-09-15 	9.3 	0.0
2015-09-13 	65.0 	0.0
2015-09-10 	24.7 	0.0
2015-09-08 	65.0 	0.0
2015-09-05 	105.0 	0.0
2015-09-03 	37.0 	0.0
2015-08-31 	305.0 	0.0
2015-08-29 	389.0 	0.0
2015-08-26 	251.3 	7.7
2015-08-24 	109.0 	20.0
2015-08-21 	276.3 	53.3
2015-08-19 	164.0 	70.0

I found this rather interesting, as the page seems to have been reachable at least to some extend. I already asked on irc if anyone has details on this, but got no reply so far. If you got an idea how comes or information on this, please let me know.

I guess as a community we also should see this as a reminder to not blindly port services to i2p from the ClearNet. Instead we probably should carefully choose what and how to port. Having a decentralised network is a big step but doesn’t provide all it’s goodies to the application layer out-of-the-box. Now getting started is a different thing, so big thx to all the people that operated and contributed to the wikis. However, it might be time to think about alternatives. Federated Wikis always come to mind, but I haven’t gotten much further this whose than to have a look at the repositories at GitHub (see links at bottom). Note: the first one is where the idea was developed until a working prototype. That one contains a wiki with intersting information. The latter is the repo for current versions, but does not have wiki-pages enabled.

ClearNet Links:

  • https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
  • https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki