(this is not an official response, just my opinion after some research on the topic)
Due to internal (and growing) complexity of the mediawiki software, and WMF installation (regarding numerous plugins and services/servers), this is a non trivial task. It also involves many moving pieces and many people- network admins (dns), general operations (load control/downtime), dbas (import/export), services, deployment engineers and developers (mediawiki configuration changes, patches).
What's worse, is that it would almost certainly create downtime for the wikis involved (not being able to edit) -specially given that it is not a common operation-, and some of them are smaller communities, and I would be worried be to annoy or discourage editing on those wikis (when we want the opposite!).
It would be great to have someone in contact with the community so that we can identify which sites have a great consensus about renaming the wiki, and are perfectly informed about the potential problems and still are ok to go forward. Maybe someone in Community engagement can evaluate risks vs. return?
On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 26/08/2015 07:20, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :
In the past when requests to rename such domains were raised, the usual replies were along the lines of "it's impossible" or "it's not worth the technical effort", but I don't know the details.
Is this still correct in 2015?
As pointed out: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T21986
For what it is worth, in 2011 JeLuF wrote a list of actions needed to rename a wiki. It is outdated nowadays but that is sufficient to state renaming a wiki is a non-trivial task: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rename_a_wiki
It would surely consume a lot of engineering time to come up with a proper migration plan and actually conduct them. I am not sure it is worth the time and money unfortunately.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
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