On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:27 AM, Lukas Mezger lukas.mezger@gmail.com wrote:
Dear readers of the Wikitech mailing list,
I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have started a project to reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact. The main idea is to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.
My project was started after Greenpeace USA published a report http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/ about the energy consumption of the biggest sites on the Internet in 2015 and in which Wikipedia, to my astonishment, performed poorly, receiving a "D" score and only passing because of the Wikimedia Foundation's openness about its energy consumption.
I don't see *anything* about energy consumption or environmental impact in their statistics there.
They do measure the relative balance of various energy sources, but that means little... We could probably be burning big lumps of coal and have a positive environmental impact if our relative energy consumption is much lower than competing sites might have been, but that isn't measured in any way.
They also measure some sort of "commitment" and "championship" of specific energy sources, which sounds nice but doesn't in any way measure energy usage or environmental impact.
I would very much like to change that and set up a page called "Environmental impact https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact" on Meta. I have already discussed the issue with a few people both from the Wikimedia Foundation's management and from the Wikimedia community and have received positive responses.
Neat!
-- brion
In order to further advance the project, I would like to learn more about how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.
Also, I am interested to learn how changing a server site's energy sources can be carried out on the operations side since the United States energy sector hasn't been completely deregulated yet.
So, thank you very much for any comments! Maybe there also is an even better forum to discuss these questions?
Finally, if you would like to support my project, please consider adding your name to this list https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact#Show_your_support. Thank you. Kind regards,
Lukas Mezger / User:Gnom https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gnom _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l