[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

[Teofilo]

You have probably heard about CO2 and the conference being held these
days in Copenhagen (1).

You have probably heard about the goal of carbon neutrality at the
Wikimania conference in Gdansk in July 2010 (2).

You may want to discuss the basic and perhaps naive wishes I have
written down on the strategy wiki about paper consumption (3).

Do we have an idea of the energy consumption related to the online
access to a Wikipedia article ? Some people say that a few minutes
long search on a search engine costs as much energy as boiling water
for a cup of tea : is that story true in the case of Wikipedia (4) ?

How about moving the servers (5) from Florida to a cold country
(Alaska, Canada, Finland, Russia) so that they can be used to heat
offices or homes ? It might not be unrealistic as one may read such
things as "the solution was to provide nearby homes with our waste
heat" (6).

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference_2009
(2) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2010/Bids/Gda%C5%84sk#Environmental_issues
(3) http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Environmental_policy_for_paper_products
(4) http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece
(5) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
(6) http://www.greenercomputing.com/news/2009/12/08/giant-data-center-heat-london-homes