(anonymous) wrote:
[...] I think I'd add "general direction of centralizing everything under a single Wikimedia Foundation is a bad idea" as a permanent blocker. Maybe there's a reasonable case for why deprecating the Toolserver and creating Wikimedia Labs is a great idea, but I don't see it yet.
I don't see why each (Wikimedia) chapter shouldn't have its own replica of the databases. We want free content to be free (and re-used and re-mixed and whatever else). If you're going to invest in infrastructure, I think it makes more sense to bolster replication support than try to compete with the Toolserver.
That said, pooled resources can sometimes be a smart move to save on investments such as hardware. Chapters working together is not a bad thing (I believe some chapters donated to Wikimedia Deutschland for Toolserver support in the past). But the broader point is that users should be very cautious of the general direction that a Wikimedia (Foundation) Labs is headed and ask whether it's really a good idea iff it means the destruction of free-standing projects such as the Toolserver.
IMHO you have to differentiate between data and function. It makes no sense to build artificial obstacles when setting up some tool that can only be reasonably used with the live dataset. On the other hand, preparing for a day where WMF turns rogue is never wrong.
But the nice thing about Labs is that you can try out (re- plicable :-)) replication setups at no cost, and don't have to upfront investments on hardware, etc., so when time comes, you can just upload your setup to EC2 or whatever and have a working Wikipedia clone running in a manageable time- frame.
Tim