The Wikimedia Technical department is doing a major test for a new data
center. This work will improve the reliability of the servers and their
ability to recover from a major disaster. As part of this work, it will
briefly be necessary to put all of the wikis into read-only mode. This
will make it *impossible to edit or save any page* on Wikipedia or any
related project, including the Outreach wiki, during those times.
The current schedule [1] is this:
* No editing for 5 minutes on Tuesday, 15 March at 07:00 UTC (3:00 a.m. EDT)
* No editing for 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 22 March
* No editing for 15 to 30 minutes on Thursday, 24 March
The exact time for the second and third events has not been determined. It
will be posted at [1]. It will probably be during a low-traffic time such
as 7:00 UTC.
I am sending this information to these lists because being unable to edit
would obviously be very disruptive to any training classes or
edit-a-thons. I apologize for the late notice. I hope that this will not
interfere with any of your work.
There is more information posted here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Server_switch_2016 If you have
questions for me, then please contact me on wiki at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Whatamidoing_(WMF)
[1]
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Switch_Datacenter#Schedule_for_Q3_FY201…
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Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.