Refereed Papers

Track: Technology for Developing Regions

Paper Title:
DTWiki: A Disconnection and Intermittency Tolerant Wiki

Authors:

• Bowei Du(University of California, Berkeley)
• Eric A. Brewer(University of California, Berkeley)

Abstract:
Wikis have proven to be a valuable tool for collaboration and content generation on the web. Simple semantics and ease-of-use make wiki systems well suited for meeting many emerging region needs in the areas of education, collaboration and local content generation. Despite their usefulness, current wiki software does not work well in the network environments found in emerging regions. For example, it is common to have long-lasting network partitions due to cost, power and poor connectivity. Network partitions make a traditional centralized wiki architecture unusable due to the unavailability of the central server. Existing solutions towards addressing connectivity problems include web-caching proxies and snapshot distribution. While proxies and snapshots allow wiki data to be read while disconnected, they prevent users from contributing updates back to the wiki. In this paper we detail the design and implementation of DTWiki, a wiki system which explicitly addresses the problem of operating a wiki system in an intermittent environment. The DTWiki system is able to cope with long-lasting partitions and bad connectivity while providing the functionality of popular wiki software such as MediaWiki and TWiki.

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