I have the dates for this project now!
First outage: Wednesday, 19 April 2017
Second outage: Wednesday, 3 May 2017
I do not have the time of day yet. My assumption is that both outages are likely to happen somewhere between 14:00 and 16:00 UTC (afternoon in Europe and Africa/morning in the Americas), but the team has not settled on a particular time.
There will be no editing, uploading, or other ways of contributing during a critical stage in this process. The outages will last for about 30 minutes on each of the two days.
The schedule may change. It could be postponed literally at the last second if Ops is not satisfied with the situation. If you want to check the schedule to make sure that it has not changed, then check these links:
Please share this information, especially with any person who might be scheduling a workshop during the next few weeks. If you are scheduling a workshop on these days, or if you are worried that a delay might affect your workshop, then feel free to send me information about your plans.
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).
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Sherry Snyder (WhatamIdoing)
Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation