Hi Giles,
I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as scheduled.
In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This data
is essential in maintaining an audit trail of references as long as
the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively, allowing those
who inherit domains to censor them, even if they have already been
used as a reference in Wikipedia. Keeping the cache is absolutely a
fair use right in the US, in both statutory and case law, and it is
essential to be able to track down patterns of attempts at deceptive
editing to address quality concerns around deliberately biased editing
such as paid editing. Because of the sensitivity of this goal, the
Foundation should certainly bear the risk of hosting the reflinks
cache. However, in the past, 20 TB was considered excessive, even
though the cost was shown to be less than $5000 without whatever Dell
NSA-enabled hardware you usually buy.
Would you please reach out to en:User:Dispenser and offer them the
20TB hosting solution they need for the Foundation to bear the risk of
the reflinks cache? Thank you for your kind consideration.
Best regards,
Jim