This is early warning of some planned server operations, as an outage can
cause a severe disruption on a short workshop:
In April 2016, the Technology Operations team at the WMF did some work on
the servers that run Wikipedia and the other wikis. This resulted in all
editing being stopped at all wikis for about half an hour on two different
days.
A similar project is currently expected sometime in April 2017. I do not
have specific dates or times yet. However, I expect the first editing
disruption to happen during the first half of April and the second to be
about two weeks afterwards.
They are hoping that the editing outages will be shorter this time (perhaps
15 to 30 minutes). The time of day is undecided; however, it will almost
certainly be when most of the Ops staff is online (afternoon in Europe and
Africa/morning in the Americas).
Last year, the official schedule was kept at
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Switch_Datacenter and the same page may
be used again. *If you are scheduling short workshops during April, then
please consider checking that schedule* or checking with me before you
finalize your plans. If you need to reach me, then I am currently
subscribed to the GLAM mailing list, and you can always leave a note on my
talk page at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Whatamidoing_(WMF)
--
Sherry Snyder (WhatamIdoing)
Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation