[Foundation-l] Politico: "Wikimedia foundation hires lobbyists on sopa, pipa"

[David Gerard]

On 22 January 2012 23:50, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> So we will put a few fallback datacenters elsewhere, just so our
> various communities and chapters realize we aren't going to be
> bullied by US jurisdiction.


AIUI setting up the new Virginia datacentre took considerable effort
and planning, so it's not a trivial task. And the key, of course, is
not "do we have a few hundred squids?" but "where does the really
pretty centralised MySQL database for that particular wiki live?" But
this suggests a significant part of the hard thinking on this issue
has been done.

This ties into the question (which should be easier to raise now) of
"how forkable is Wikipedia in practice?" Not for purposes of forking
with rancor, but for basic backup hygiene: given the available data,
software and configuration information, is it actually feasible to
create a working backup of Wikipedia, if the WMF is hit by a legal
meteor?

This is getting towards a wikitech-l discussion ... but your basic
concept is sound: as digital natives, we understand instinctively that
the way to preserve something is to spread *lots* of copies of it
around. Even if doing so is quite difficult and unwieldy.


- d.