(anonymous) wrote:
[...]
I think I'd add "general direction of centralizing everything under a single
Wikimedia Foundation is a bad idea" as a permanent blocker. Maybe there's a
reasonable case for why deprecating the Toolserver and creating Wikimedia
Labs is a great idea, but I don't see it yet.
I don't see why each (Wikimedia) chapter
shouldn't have its own replica of
the databases. We want free content to be free (and re-used and re-mixed and
whatever else). If you're going to invest in infrastructure, I think it
makes more sense to bolster replication support than try to compete with the
Toolserver.
That said, pooled resources can sometimes be a smart
move to save on
investments such as hardware. Chapters working together is not a bad thing
(I believe some chapters donated to Wikimedia Deutschland for Toolserver
support in the past). But the broader point is that users should be very
cautious of the general direction that a Wikimedia (Foundation) Labs is
headed and ask whether it's really a good idea iff it means the destruction
of free-standing projects such as the Toolserver.
IMHO you have to differentiate between data and function.
It makes no sense to build artificial obstacles when setting
up some tool that can only be reasonably used with the live
dataset. On the other hand, preparing for a day where WMF
turns rogue is never wrong.
But the nice thing about Labs is that you can try out (re-
plicable :-)) replication setups at no cost, and don't have
to upfront investments on hardware, etc., so when time
comes, you can just upload your setup to EC2 or whatever and
have a working Wikipedia clone running in a manageable time-
frame.
Tim