I think the primary question to answer for any use case is "How does this help the larger Wikimedia community?". If you believe a project you are a part of does help the Wikimedia community and would benefit from the platforms WMCS provides, I encourage you to request a toolforge account or open a cloud VPS request (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2875/) to ask for those resources. Please provide as much detail on what you intend to do and the impact it will have. Note that requests are reviewed, and the wiki has some helpful details about how requests are considered: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_VPS_project#Reviews_of_Cloud_VPS_Project_requests. Specific questions on suitability can be better addressed in the form of a request, but let us know if the you still have general questions.

So please, file a request if you feel there is a good fit. That said I'll try and provide some quick thoughts to your questions:

revi, a bot for non-WMF wikis at first glance doesn't seem to meet the requirement of helping the Wikimedia community. I'd need more detail to understand if that is the case.

Kimmo, I'm not familiar with Sophox, but perhaps the project's needs go behind what WMCS is offering? It's also slightly fuzzy on the project focus between OSM and Wikimedia that would need to be addressed.

I hope this helps!

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 5:19 AM Kimmo Virtanen <kimmo.virtanen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi

Sorry if this is too offtopic in the original context, but this thread seemed to be a suitable place to ask this.

Sophox (Open Street Maps SPARQL interface by Yurik)[1] is currently down by  hardware failure and it is currently rebuilded on top of the Google cloud services. However, if the GCS is not suitable then would it be possible that WMCS would support the Sophox by offering the hardware/hosting for the Sophox if they ask for it?

I think that use of OSM sparql endpoint would benefit if it would be connected to Wikidata Query Service and Wikimedia Commons Query Services with fast connections, but i can see also that hosting  high performance SPARQL endpoint is not trivial task.[3] 

(Note: I am not connected to Sophox, but I used it for Wikimedia related queries)

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Sophox
[2] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2020-December/085714.html 
[3] https://github.com/Sophox/sophox

Br,
-- Kimmo Virtanen, Zache

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 11:26 AM Jaime Crespo <jcrespo@wikimedia.org> wrote:
revi,


WMCS is indeed not a general purpose MediaWiki-hosting platform (there are already hosting businesses for that), but MediaWiki could be hosted for projects that follow the terms of use- some of them may not be immediately apparent. For example, if translatewiki.org wanted to be hosted in WMF Cloud, I think everybody would be happy, as it is the main tool used for Wikimedia project translation, even if it is also used for 3rd party ones. Several communities (e.g. Wikimedia user groups) are offered cloud or even production wiki hosting if they are key to the advancement to the mission: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

If you believe someone may be violating the terms of service, to the detriment of the community, send a notification in private to the Cloud Team and they can have a look.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 9:58 AM revi <lists@revi.email> wrote:

Question: Is it permitted to use WMCS (be it Cloud VPS or Toolforge) resources for non-Wikimedia, Mediawiki-run website purposes? (Let's assume sites like FANDOM(Wikia), Miraheze, or https://librewiki.net )

Background: I was discussing some non-wikimedia (but mediawiki-run site) stuff at some chatroom. Someone there thought they could use Wikimedia Cloud resources for non-WMF websites (I don't know if it relates to MW development) purposes. I am not sure if this is allowed (my interpretation is that it is not allowed), so I want some clarification on that.

나의 iPhone에서 보냄
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