On 05/09/13 13:37, MZMcBride wrote: I agree: this does seem to be a curious decision, at odds with the WMF's general policy of self-hosting as much as possible in order to maintain maximum independence from outside entities, particularly in the context of the recent concerns about privacy. I would have thought that maintaining a WordPress installation would be well within the WMF's capabilities. Neil ______________________________**_________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.**org &lt;Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<https://lists…-l>, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@**lists.wikimedia.org<wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org> ?subject=**unsubscribe>

This was definitely mentioned at Wikimania. What I understood is that it will be hosted externally for performance and reliability reasons, but that the rest should remain the same.

Anyway, I'm not an expert here, just what I understood from Matthew Roth & friends Lodewijk 2013/9/5 Richard Symonds &lt;richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk&gt; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy#Blog_not_hosted_by_Word… 4LT. I not WMF's maintaining https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l< _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

As I understand the blog is currently a self-hosted instance of Wordpress and the idea is to move the hosting to somewhere else. (So this is not MediaWiki vs. Wordpress, but self-hosting vs. not self-hosting)

Best regards, Bence On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:29 PM, Theo10011 &lt;de10011(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: it

there Roth https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy#Blog_not_hosted_by_Word… EC2A wrote: a means to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Leslie Carr &lt;lcarr(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: That is a argument for changing the blogging tool/platform, Not changing

non self-hosted environment.

On 5 September 2013 22:07, K. Peachey &lt;p858snake(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: tl;dr Wordpress is the only blog that isn't shit. And Wordpress.com is a fine place to host a blog if you don't want ever to have to think about the nuts and bolts of securing the thing. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

At least OTRS and mailman belong inside our security "bubble" of control, where the only people with access are ops and they can be properly secured. The security risk of those applications potentially introducing and attacker to all our data is minimal compared to the much greater risk of placing our user names, passwords, email addresses, and highly private OTRS queues in the hands of a third party including all their technicians, not to mention their security practices that we have no control over. As for the other question. If the nsa sends a letter to WordPress then they can get the email address and IP of someone who posted a post or comment to our blog. Probably the password too. If we host it over SSL then there's no way for them to know even that a given user commented, and if we did SSL right (maybe in another ten years) no one would know whether an IP was anon browsing, a checkuser or oversight, or reading our highly sensitive OTRS queues.

Hi all, I was going to socialize some of the transitions for the Wikimedia blog in the next few weeks on the Wikimedia blog space<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog>on Meta and on the blog itself with a blog post, but this conversation has sped up the discussion. I plan to have something on Meta by the beginning of next week and hope that we can continue the discussion there when the content is posted. As a general concept, we’re redesigning the blog to be less focused on the Wikimedia Foundation and more on the Wikimedia movement. For the past year, we have been sharing more narratives from the movement, making this important communications tool more about movement partners and not exclusively about the Wikimedia Foundation. We believe the public has little understanding of the people behind the projects and we want to share their stories (i.e. why the contribute, why they edit, why they develop). We still need the tool to communicate important updates from the WMF, but that can be accomplished in a larger ecosystem with more diversity of voices. We’ve had a significant increase in publication from authors who don’t work for the WMF, as well as increased multi-lingual posts, and we will continue to increase the amount and diversity of participation. Specifically, let me address a couple of points raised in this thread. - We are redesigning the blog. For those at Wikimania who saw my talk, we shared the working site for the new Wikimedia blog and explained the basics of our thinking. Here is the link for the site under construction. Please understand this is still under construction and there will be some changes, but this is the basic design of the new Wikimedia blog. It’s also populated with data from a db dump that is now 2 months old, so you will see significant content difference from the current Wikimedia blog. The draft version of the blog is hosted on an outside platform, WP Engine, but this is not necessarily the hosting company we may use in future: http://wikimedia.wpengine.com/ - We’re exploring the possibility of 3rd-party hosting of the blog. We had extensive discussions with members of the WMF Operations and Engineering teams about whether to continue to host the blog on our servers or move to a 3rd-party host. Ultimately we determined that 3rd party hosts made sense for the blog for a number of important reasons. I would refer you to the email in this thread<http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/387838#3878… Leslie Carr in our Ops team, but essentially they feel that a move to a 3rd party host would address important security and support concerns, and would therefore be preferable to continuing to host the blog ourselves. - A 3rd-party host will give us redundancy and strong backups. The blog has become the Foundation’s primary public communications tool (alongside, naturally, the host of wikis we use to converse with the community). We want to be sure this platform is hosted on a 3rd-party site in case we encounter a significant outage or cluster-wide downtime. Obviously we can’t rely on the projects to get that information out if the cluster is down, and although we will continue to use identi.ca, twitter, and facebook, we’d like to have a stable place to point traffic. - The blog needs to be able to handle a lot of traffic, quickly. We know that Wikimedia’s servers are up to this kind of task, but we’re experts at hosting wikis - not necessarily experts at hosting blogs. Specifically blogs that may need to handle very large volumes of traffic, spam, and comments in a short period of time. We had one such situation back in 2012 during the Wikipedia blackout. We sent tens of millions of readers to the Wikimedia blog and dealt with around 18K comments in a matter of hours. We could handle it, but we’d like to have capacity to handle that in an emergency situation. Not all blog hosting companies can do this, but a few that we’re looking at are expressly built to handle immediate and massive increases in traffic, and they’ve got amazing back up services. - We have not yet selected a 3rd-party host. We have screened a couple of 3rd-party hosts. While Wordpress.com is one of our top choices (not the standard consumer version, rather their ‘managed’ or white glove hosting services for high volume customers), we have not yet selected them. Right now the WMF legal team is in discussions with Wordpress.com and others. We appreciate that if we host on a 3rd party site, we need to navigate the important issue of ensuring our privacies policies are compatible. - The new blog is responsive and much better on multiple devices. With the 2012 Wordpress theme, we can easily adapt our blog to multiple screen widths. Please try expanding and narrowing your browser widths to see the responsive design, or load the new blog on a mobile or tablet. - We feel Wordpress is still the best tool for blog publishing. While wikis are functional for many things, we feel Wordpress is better for blogging/publishing. When we started the blog redesign, we briefly discussed other platforms, but we don’t believe there is a superior tool for the blog. Because we’ve had a Wordpress install since 2008 and it has worked well for us since then, we decided not to change. We also needed to be sure that however we proceeded, we could also move away if we need to, and easily and quickly resume hosting of the blog or move it somewhere else. - When we move hosting to a 3rd-party site, users will need to agree to the new privacy policy that we work out for the blog. During the transition when we update the database and move the blog from our cluster to a 3rd-party site, current blog users will need to create new accounts on the new blog and agree to the new privacy policy. More to come next week, but hopefully this addresses some of the concerns raised here. We’re very interested in your feedback and hope that we can capture all the comments and critique on the Meta page when it is up. thanks, Matthew On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Dan Collins &lt;en.wp.st47(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Matthew Roth Global Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635 www.wikimediafoundation.org *http://blog.wikimedia.org/* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:57 PM, shi zhao &lt;shizhao(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Welp, there goes that plan.

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:54 PM, Greg Grossmeier &lt;greg(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Here are a few: http://wordpress.org/showcase -- Matthew Roth Global Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635 www.wikimediafoundation.org *http://blog.wikimedia.org/* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

As a general concept, we’re redesigning the blog to be less focused on the Wikimedia Foundation and more on the Wikimedia movement. For the past year, we have been sharing more narratives from the movement, making this important communications tool more about movement partners and not exclusively about the Wikimedia Foundation. We believe the public has little understanding of the people behind the projects and we want to share their stories (i.e. why the contribute, why they edit, why they develop).

We have not yet selected a 3rd-party host. We have screened a couple of 3rd-party hosts. While Wordpress.com is one of our top choices (not the standard consumer version, rather their 'managed' or white glove hosting services for high volume customers), we have not yet selected them. Right now the WMF legal team is in discussions with Wordpress.com and others.

We appreciate that if we host on a 3rd party site, we need to navigate the important issue of ensuring our privacies policies are compatible.

When we move hosting to a 3rd-party site, users will need to agree to the new privacy policy that we work out for the blog. During the transition when we update the database and move the blog from our cluster to a 3rd-party site, current blog users will need to create new accounts on the new blog and agree to the new privacy policy.

On 6 September 2013 14:19, MZMcBride wrote: Yes. It's important that none of this happen.

What should not be missed out in the discussion is the fact that blog post according to current guidelines should be written on the wiki.

Additionally accounts are not integrated. Operations is afraid of spikes, and spam. So why not just use the best platform we all know for this, and where the posts anyway get written now? Mediawiki. Wikinews allows original research. Having an additional type of communication on there would drive the project and solve all technical problems. That should not say that there might not be some other problems, but i would love to hear about them. Rupert Am 06.09.2013 16:32 schrieb "Federico Leva (Nemo)" &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: I Button, from a or https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikimedia_budget&diff… https://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph.php?r=week&z=xlarge&titl… https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>gt;, wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Matthew Roth &lt;mroth(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

> Drafting on wiki is more of a good process than an ideal way to publish the > content, in my opinion.

why?

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Leslie Carr &lt;lcarr(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: and may incidents. Exactly. Just because we have people who have no trouble maintaining a WordPress install doesn't mean we should. Time is always limited, and we have to prioritize. Working with a reputable third party that also drives development of the same open source software seems like a perfectly reasonable choice to me in this instance. And BTW - we do get situations where the blog gets a huge spike of traffic every once in a while, e.g. during the SOPA/PIPA protest, so hosting it ourselves is not as effortless as it may seem, without even accounting for customization requests from our communications team, etc. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

As I understand the blog is currently a self-hosted instance of Wordpress and the idea is to move the hosting to somewhere else. (So this is not MediaWiki vs. Wordpress, but self-hosting vs. not self-hosting) Best regards, Bence On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:29 PM, Theo10011 &lt;de10011(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Lodewijk &lt;lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org > >wrote: > > > This was definitely mentioned at Wikimania. What I understood is that

> > will be hosted externally for performance and reliability reasons, but > that > > the rest should remain the same. > > > > So, A blog for one of the top 10 websites in the world is being hosted > externally "for performance and reliability"? - That doesn't sound

> Maybe Mr. Roth & friends can clarify a bit here. > > Blogs generally don't require a lot of resources, aside from some

> oversight. But it's not like there is a deluge of comments or moderation > required in the current blog - they average about 1, maybe 2 comments

> from my impression, don't particularly have a high number of regular > followers. > > This seems like something trivial, perhaps because of familiarity with > Wordpress, it is being preferred in this case. But then, why are we > willingly and so easily handing the visitors to a third party?

> with so much paranoia about monitoring and privacy issues. Even for the > sake of our own impression and opinions - Is there a particular role

> that Mediawiki can't fill in? (I recall Erik once argued that wiki is

> most versatile platform, does he believe that Wordpress is a better > alternative? ) > > Regards > Theo > > > > > > Anyway, I'm not an expert here, just what I understood from Matthew

> & > > friends > > > > Lodewijk > > > > > > 2013/9/5 Richard Symonds &lt;richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk&gt; > > > > > This is being discussed on-wiki too, at > > > > > > > > >

> > > . > > > > > > Richard Symonds > > > Wikimedia UK > > > 0207 065 0992 > > > > > > Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England > and > > > Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. > Registered > > > Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London

> > 4LT. > > > United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia > > > movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation > (who > > > operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). > > > > > > *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal > control > > > over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.* > > > > > > > > > On 5 September 2013 14:00, Neil Harris &lt;neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt;

> > > > > > > On 05/09/13 13:37, MZMcBride wrote: > > > > > > > >> Hi. > > > >> > > > >> The recent draft privacy policy mentions that the Wikimedia blog > > > >> (<https://blog.wikimedia.org>) will soon be hosted by > WordPress.com. > > > >> > > > >> Was this discussed anywhere? If so, where? > > > >> > > > >> What is the proposed URL structure of a blog hosted by > WordPress.com? > > I > > > >> think there's a reasonable expectation that when a user visits > > > >> *.wikimedia.org, we don't simply send his or her browser info to

> > > third > > > >> party without his or her consent. This has come up previously

> > > Jobvite > > > >> and iframes. It's also come up with the use of tracking tools

> as > > > >> Google Analytics, which not only affect one-time visitors, but

> to > > > >> persist client-side. > > > >> > > > >> How will the blog be backed up? Relying on an external service

> > not > > > >> being in control of the data. Will there be regular backups made

> > > ensure > > > >> that if WordPress.com goes away, we won't lose all of our posts? > > > >> > > > >> MZMcBride > > > >> > > > >> > > > >> > > > >> > > > > I agree: this does seem to be a curious decision, at odds with the > > WMF's > > > > general policy of self-hosting as much as possible in order to > maintain > > > > maximum independence from outside entities, particularly in the > context > > > of > > > > the recent concerns about privacy. I would have thought that > > maintaining > > > a > > > > WordPress installation would be well within the WMF's

> > > > Unsubscribe: > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l< > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>gt;, > > > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@**lists.wikimedia.org< > > > wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; > > > > ?subject=**unsubscribe> > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list > > > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > > Unsubscribe:

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,

This is a very good point - we must try to protect logs of visitors to the WMF blog from the inevitably prying eyes of the National Security Agency! And only by self-hosting it will this be effectively accomplished!

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Lodewijk &lt;lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org&gt;wrote;wrote: So, A blog for one of the top 10 websites in the world is being hosted externally "for performance and reliability"? - That doesn't sound right. Maybe Mr. Roth & friends can clarify a bit here. Blogs generally don't require a lot of resources, aside from some comment oversight. But it's not like there is a deluge of comments or moderation required in the current blog - they average about 1, maybe 2 comments and from my impression, don't particularly have a high number of regular followers. This seems like something trivial, perhaps because of familiarity with Wordpress, it is being preferred in this case. But then, why are we willingly and so easily handing the visitors to a third party? especially with so much paranoia about monitoring and privacy issues. Even for the sake of our own impression and opinions - Is there a particular role there that Mediawiki can't fill in? (I recall Erik once argued that wiki is the most versatile platform, does he believe that Wordpress is a better alternative? ) Regards Theo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>