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_FY2015...