[Apologies for cross-posting; this concerns all Wikimedia projects]
Posted today on the Wikimedia Tech Blog:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/19/wikimedia-sites-move-to-primary-data-…
Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia
Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical
operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended
to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia
sites, including Wikipedia.
Engineering teams have been preparing for the migration to minimize
inconvenience to our users, but major service disruption is still expected
during the transition. Our sites will be in read-only mode for some time,
and may be intermittently inaccessible. Users are advised to be patient
during those interruptions, and share
information<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_maintenance_notice>in
case of continued outage or loss of functionality.
The current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and
24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other
timezones<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikimedia+data+cen…>on
timeanddate.com).
Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida,
since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in
San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center
to host Wikimedia sites.
A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary
data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a
time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the
site. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started
to look<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/07/wmf-needs-additional-datacenter-space/>for
other locations with better network connectivity and more clement
weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers
faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer
hurricanes.
The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data
center in Summer 2010. The actual build-out and racking of servers at the
colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long
period of hardware, system and software configuration. Traffic started to
be served to users from the Ashburn data center in November 2011, in the
form of CSS and JavaScript assets (served from “bits.wikimedia.org“).
We reached a major milestone in February 2012, when caching servers were
set up to handle read-only requests for Wikipedia and Wikimedia content,
which represent most of the traffic to Wikipedia and its sister sites. In
April 2012, the Ashburn data center also started to serve media files (from
“upload.wikimedia.org“).
Cacheable requests represent about 90 percent of our traffic, leaving 10
percent that requires interaction with our web (Apache) and database
(MySQL) servers, which are still being hosted in Tampa. Until now, every
edit made to a Wikipedia page has been handled by the servers in Tampa.
This dependency on our Tampa data center was responsible for the site
outage in August
2012<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/06/wikimedia-site-outage-6-august-2012/>,
when a fiber cut severed the connection between our two locations.
Starting next week, the new servers in Ashburn will take on that role as
well, and all our sites will be able to function fully without relying on
the servers in Florida. The legacy data center in Tampa will continue to be
maintained, and will serve as a secondary “hot failover” data center:
servers will be in standby mode to take over, should the primary site
experiences an outage. Server configuration and data will be synchronized
between the two locations to ensure a transition as smooth as possible in
case of technical difficulties in Ashburn.
Besides just installing newer hardware, setting up the data center in
Ashburn has also been an opportunity for architecture overhauls, like
incremental improvements of the text storage
system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/18/nobody-notices-when-its-not-broken-ne…>,
and the move to an entirely new media storage
system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/09/scaling-media-storage-at-wikimedia-wi…>to
keep up with the growth of the content generated and curated by our
contributors.
Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure aims to be as open and collaborative
as the sites it powers. Most of the configuration of our
servers<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-serve…>is
publicly accessible, and the Wikimedia
Labs <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/>initiative
allows contributors to test and submit improvements to the
sites’ configuration files.
The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates a total of about 885 servers,
and serves about 20 billion page views a month, on a non-profit budget that
relies almost entirely on donations from readers.
--
Guillaume Paumier
Three days left! This is also about new user groups and thematical
organisations for individual projects, so forwarding.
(Plus, it's been a while since our last all-projects mass-crossposting.
;-) )
Nemo
-------- Messaggio originale --------
Oggetto: Re: [Wikimedia-l] The Affiliations Committee is looking for
candidate members
Data: Tue, 8 Jan 2013 16:46:05 +0100
Mittente: Lodewijk
A: Wikimedia Mailing List
Hi all,
this is the last reminder that the call will be closing on January 12 -
this is four days from now.
Please share the call for candidates on relevant fora.
Best regards,
Lodewijk Gelauff
2013/1/2 Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
> Dear all,
>
> I would like to take this opportunity to remind you all that the
> Affiliations Committee is still looking for candidates! Applications can be
> sent in until 12 January as explained below.
>
> Do you understand how Wikimedia works as an organization, and would you
> like to help new organizations to get started? Then please apply! I hope
> for many high quality applications!
>
> Best,
> Lodewijk
>
> 2012/12/12 Bence Damokos <bdamokos(a)gmail.com>
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> The Affiliations Committee [1], the committee that is responsible for
>> guiding volunteers in establishing Chapters, User Groups and Thematic
>> Organizations ("affiliates" in short) and approving them when they are
>> ready is looking for about 6 new members.
>>
>> The main focus of AffCom is to guide groups of volunteers in forming
>> affiliates. We make sure that the group is large enough to be viable
>> (and advise them on how to get bigger), review bylaws for compliance
>> with the requirements and best practices, and advise the Board of the
>> Wikimedia Foundation on issues connected to Chapters, Thematic
>> Organizations and User Groups.
>>
>> This requires communication with volunteers all over the World,
>> negotiating skills and cultural sensitivity and the ability to
>> understand legal texts. We try to get a healthy mix of different skill
>> sets in our members.
>>
>> Key skills/experience that we are looking for in candidate members,
>> are typically:
>>
>> * Excitement by the challenge of helping to empower groups of
>> volunteers worldwide
>> * Willingness to work in a sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes political
>> process
>> * 4 hours per week availability[2]
>> * International orientation
>> * Very good communication skills in English
>> * Ability to work and communicate with other cultures
>> * Strong understanding of the structure and work of affiliates and the WMF
>> * Communication skills in other languages are a major plus
>> * Experience with or in an active affiliate is a major plus
>>
>> With the help of the Affiliations Committee, 2012 has been an exciting
>> year of transformation for the movement with the introduction of new
>> types of affiliation. This means that the workload of the Committee
>> has increased and diversified and help is wanted! Currently many
>> applications to become a Chapter, Thematic Organization or User Group
>> are in the pipeline and can use your attention and dedication!
>>
>> You can send your applications with your name, contact data (e-mail,
>> wiki username), experience and motivation to join to the AffCom email
>> address, affcom AT lists DOT wikimedia DOT org by January 12, 2013.
>> You will get a confirmation that your application came through.
>>
>> Members are usually selected every twelve months for staggered two
>> year terms. The applications will be considered by the current members
>> and outgoing members and Committee advisers, who are not seeking
>> re-selection.
>>
>> Since I will be a candidate for re-selection myself, this process will
>> be managed by another committee member, Lodewijk Gelauff. I hope for
>> many suitable applications. If you have any questions, please don't
>> hesitate to email me or Lodewijk[3] privately. We are happy to chat or
>> have a phone call with anyone about our work, if this helps them
>> decide to apply.
>>
>> Please distribute this call among your networks, and do apply if you
>> are interested.
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Bence Damokos
>> Chair,
>> Affiliations Committee
>>
>>
>>
>> [1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee (please
>> follow the links and familiarize yourself with our work)
>> [2]: Our member standards of participation are at:
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Standard_…
>> [3]: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Effeietsanders
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>>
>
>
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Hi.
I've started a discussion at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Organizing_discussion_spaces_on_…
about organizing Meta's discussion spaces better.
A copy of the proposal is pasted below to get more eyeballs on (and
voices in) the discussion, but in order to keep the discussion
centralized, please add your comments on the wiki rather than on the
list.
Depending on how this goes, I may even try to revive the MetaProject
to Overhaul Meta once again :)
======================================
Hi. I've been working on organizing / cleaning up a few areas here on
meta, and I'd like to address the topic of discussion spaces.
There are currently several main discussion spaces split by topic:
Meta:Babel (this page): a place to discuss general stuff related
to meta-wiki
Wikimedia Forum: a place to discuss general Wikimedia stuff
Meta talk:Babylon: a place to discuss translation stuff
Help Forum: a place to get general help
Tech: a place to get technical help
Despite editing meta-wiki for years, I still find this quite
confusing, in no small part due to the various names: I usually mix
"Babel" and "Babylon", and I never remember if meta-specific issues
should go to "Babel" or to the "Forum".
I'd like to start a discussion to see if we can find consensus to
organize those pages better.
One solution would be to use a system similar to what exists on a few
Wikimedia wikis, with subpages for specific areas. For example, this
could look like:
Forum (Wikimedia Forum)
Forum/Meta (Meta:Babel)
Forum/Translation (Meta talk:Babylon)
Forum/Help (Help Forum)
Forum/Tech (Tech)
I've chosen "Forum" as the parent page because it's a Latin word and
therefore more language-neutral than idioms like "Village Pump", but
obviously this is up for discussion. We can also discuss whether it
should be in the Meta: namespace. We can also discuss completely
different solutions, but I do want us to try and come up with a system
that is more sane than the current situation.
======================================
--
Guillaume Paumier