[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia blog moving to WordPress.com
shi zhao
shizhao at gmail.com
Fri Sep 6 01:57:06 UTC 2013
*.Wordpress.com blocked in China.....
Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
My blog: http://shizhao.org
twitter: https://twitter.com/shizhao
[[zh:User:Shizhao]]
2013/9/6 Matthew Roth <mroth at wikimedia.org>:
> Hi all,
>
> I was going to socialize some of the transitions for the Wikimedia blog in
> the next few weeks on the Wikimedia blog
> space<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog>on Meta and on
> the blog itself with a blog post, but this conversation has
> sped up the discussion. I plan to have something on Meta by the beginning
> of next week and hope that we can continue the discussion there when the
> content is posted.
>
> As a general concept, we’re redesigning the blog to be less focused on the
> Wikimedia Foundation and more on the Wikimedia movement. For the past year,
> we have been sharing more narratives from the movement, making this
> important communications tool more about movement partners and not
> exclusively about the Wikimedia Foundation. We believe the public has
> little understanding of the people behind the projects and we want to share
> their stories (i.e. why the contribute, why they edit, why they develop).
> We still need the tool to communicate important updates from the WMF, but
> that can be accomplished in a larger ecosystem with more diversity of
> voices. We’ve had a significant increase in publication from authors who
> don’t work for the WMF, as well as increased multi-lingual posts, and we
> will continue to increase the amount and diversity of participation.
>
> Specifically, let me address a couple of points raised in this thread.
>
>
> -
>
> We are redesigning the blog. For those at Wikimania who saw my talk, we
> shared the working site for the new Wikimedia blog and explained the basics
> of our thinking. Here is the link for the site under construction. Please
> understand this is still under construction and there will be some changes,
> but this is the basic design of the new Wikimedia blog. It’s also populated
> with data from a db dump that is now 2 months old, so you will see
> significant content difference from the current Wikimedia blog. The draft
> version of the blog is hosted on an outside platform, WP Engine, but this
> is not necessarily the hosting company we may use in future:
> http://wikimedia.wpengine.com/
> -
>
> We’re exploring the possibility of 3rd-party hosting of the blog. We had
> extensive discussions with members of the WMF Operations and Engineering
> teams about whether to continue to host the blog on our servers or move to
> a 3rd-party host. Ultimately we determined that 3rd party hosts made sense
> for the blog for a number of important reasons. I would refer you to the
> email in this
> thread<http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/387838#387838>from
> Leslie Carr in our Ops team, but essentially they feel that a move to
> a 3rd party host would address important security and support concerns, and
> would therefore be preferable to continuing to host the blog ourselves.
> -
>
> A 3rd-party host will give us redundancy and strong backups. The blog
> has become the Foundation’s primary public communications tool (alongside,
> naturally, the host of wikis we use to converse with the community). We
> want to be sure this platform is hosted on a 3rd-party site in case we
> encounter a significant outage or cluster-wide downtime. Obviously we can’t
> rely on the projects to get that information out if the cluster is down,
> and although we will continue to use identi.ca, twitter, and facebook,
> we’d like to have a stable place to point traffic.
> -
>
> The blog needs to be able to handle a lot of traffic, quickly. We know
> that Wikimedia’s servers are up to this kind of task, but we’re experts at
> hosting wikis - not necessarily experts at hosting blogs. Specifically
> blogs that may need to handle very large volumes of traffic, spam, and
> comments in a short period of time. We had one such situation back in 2012
> during the Wikipedia blackout. We sent tens of millions of readers to the
> Wikimedia blog and dealt with around 18K comments in a matter of hours. We
> could handle it, but we’d like to have capacity to handle that in an
> emergency situation. Not all blog hosting companies can do this, but a few
> that we’re looking at are expressly built to handle immediate and massive
> increases in traffic, and they’ve got amazing back up services.
> -
>
> We have not yet selected a 3rd-party host. We have screened a couple of
> 3rd-party hosts. While Wordpress.com is one of our top choices (not the
> standard consumer version, rather their ‘managed’ or white glove hosting
> services for high volume customers), we have not yet selected them. Right
> now the WMF legal team is in discussions with Wordpress.com and others. We
> appreciate that if we host on a 3rd party site, we need to navigate the
> important issue of ensuring our privacies policies are compatible.
> -
>
> The new blog is responsive and much better on multiple devices. With the
> 2012 Wordpress theme, we can easily adapt our blog to multiple screen
> widths. Please try expanding and narrowing your browser widths to see the
> responsive design, or load the new blog on a mobile or tablet.
> -
>
> We feel Wordpress is still the best tool for blog publishing. While
> wikis are functional for many things, we feel Wordpress is better for
> blogging/publishing. When we started the blog redesign, we briefly
> discussed other platforms, but we don’t believe there is a superior tool
> for the blog. Because we’ve had a Wordpress install since 2008 and it has
> worked well for us since then, we decided not to change. We also needed to
> be sure that however we proceeded, we could also move away if we need to,
> and easily and quickly resume hosting of the blog or move it somewhere else.
> -
>
> When we move hosting to a 3rd-party site, users will need to agree to
> the new privacy policy that we work out for the blog. During the
> transition when we update the database and move the blog from our cluster
> to a 3rd-party site, current blog users will need to create new accounts on
> the new blog and agree to the new privacy policy.
>
>
> More to come next week, but hopefully this addresses some of the concerns
> raised here. We’re very interested in your feedback and hope that we can
> capture all the comments and critique on the Meta page when it is up.
>
> thanks,
> Matthew
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Dan Collins <en.wp.st47 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> At least OTRS and mailman belong inside our security "bubble" of control,
>> where the only people with access are ops and they can be properly secured.
>> The security risk of those applications potentially introducing and
>> attacker to all our data is minimal compared to the much greater risk of
>> placing our user names, passwords, email addresses, and highly private OTRS
>> queues in the hands of a third party including all their technicians, not
>> to mention their security practices that we have no control over.
>>
>> As for the other question. If the nsa sends a letter to WordPress then they
>> can get the email address and IP of someone who posted a post or comment to
>> our blog. Probably the password too. If we host it over SSL then there's no
>> way for them to know even that a given user commented, and if we did SSL
>> right (maybe in another ten years) no one would know whether an IP was anon
>> browsing, a checkuser or oversight, or reading our highly sensitive OTRS
>> queues.
>> On Sep 5, 2013 6:28 PM, "Gregory Varnum" <gregory.varnum at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I think this makes 100% sense from an operations perspective. Anytime
>> you
>> > can "outsource" a lower priority web service - fantastic.
>> >
>> > However, from a community advocacy perspective - I am less convinced. I
>> > would be curious if anyone from that team could chime in as well.
>> >
>> > The security argument makes a great deal of sense to me - making the
>> > primary production sites vulnerable should always be avoided if at all
>> > humanly possible to do so.
>> >
>> > Here are some lingering questions I would have for Advocacy and Ops:
>> > 1. How closely are we working with WordPress.com staff on this setup?
>> > 2. Will we be paying for the service? (I know it is minimal - more
>> curious
>> > than anything)
>> > 3. Is the Automattic (company behind WordPress) privacy policy compatible
>> > with WMF's current and proposed (as it exists now) privacy policy?
>> > 4. Will people be required to register with WordPress.com to participate
>> > in the blog?
>> > 5. I recognize we utilize a lot of corporations - but most do not handle
>> > our content (I suppose data centers and bandwidth - but I digress) -
>> > generally that has been our own or a nonprofit like Freenode (if you
>> count
>> > IRC as content service). Additionally, they use ads - which has been a
>> hot
>> > topic on project sites. Recognizing the blog is not really a project
>> site
>> > that is covered as tightly under our principles - can someone speak to
>> the
>> > compatibility of Automattic's policies and values with WM and WMF? How
>> are
>> > we getting around the ads?
>> > 6. Are there other services on WMF servers that could be potential
>> > security threats? Are OTRS, Mailman, and Etherpad subject to these
>> concerns
>> > as well? Is there a likely possibility that other services will be moved
>> in
>> > the future?
>> > 7. Should all of these services be moved to a separate server? Is that
>> > feasible?
>> >
>> > I appreciate that WMF is having this dialogue before the switch actually
>> > happens. I agree it is a compelling idea.
>> >
>> > - greg aka varnent
>> >
>> >
>> > On 5 Sep, 2013, at 5:16 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > > On 5 September 2013 22:07, K. Peachey <p858snake at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > >> That is a argument for changing the blogging tool/platform, Not
>> > changing to
>> > >> non self-hosted environment.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > tl;dr Wordpress is the only blog that isn't shit. And Wordpress.com is
>> > > a fine place to host a blog if you don't want ever to have to think
>> > > about the nuts and bolts of securing the thing.
>> > >
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> > > Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> > Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Matthew Roth
> Global Communications Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
> +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
> www.wikimediafoundation.org
> *http://blog.wikimedia.org/*
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
More information about the Wikimedia-l
mailing list