Hi folks! I am the Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, which means I'm a liaison for people who want to improve the technical capabilities of our projects. I spoke with a few of you offlist (including at Wikimania) about maps and Wikimedia. While I'm still getting up to speed on the proposals and tools people have made, I wanted to give you an update regarding what's happening with Wikimedia's planned OpenStreetMap tileserver.
We know that we will set up a production tileserver. That is, Wikimedia plans to have an OpenStreetMap tileserver, in production (that is, fully supported by our Operations department and with uptime expectations similar to those for our main sites). We need this not only for the tools community but also for use in our official mobile apps. Brandon Black is the contact for this. He is a member of the Operations team at WMF. In order to set up a production-level tileserver, we will also need a production OSM database, so he is working on figuring out how best to grab that data from the official OSM database regularly (I am oversimplifying here).
Brandon has already started on the project of setting up the production tileserver. I know that he will be posting regular updates at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/OSM_Tileserver but he is still in the investigation and architecture phase so he does not have a timeline yet. I'm sorry, I know that is frustrating.
Very soon after we have the production tileserver running, we plan to replicate that OSM database to Wikimedia Labs for use on Tool Labs, or do similar SQL import magic. People using Labs will be able to draw data directly from that replica, and will be able to grab tiles from the production tileserver. I'm the contact on this but since Coren (Marc-Andre Pelletier) is the domain expert on this particular bit of database replication, please go ahead and include both of us on any questions.
Thanks, all.