[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia blog moving to WordPress.com

[Erik Moeller]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Leslie Carr <lcarr at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Currently the blog is in a partially maintained by Operations state.  In
> ops, we have a few concerns - #1 is security (exemplified by our recent
> security incident) of having a wordpress instance in our production
> environment.  #2 is support of the blog from a technical standpoint.  We
> are currently all oversubscribed with trying to keep the production sites
> up and speedy.  The blog is low priority for us compared to the wiki's, and
> therefore is often neglected.  When we hire about 5 more ops people, it may
> be more sustainable, but right now, it's not - so it would actually be a
> net positive for the Operations team to move the blog onto a dedicated
> third party, and will also hopefully prevent any future security incidents.

Exactly. Just because we have people who have no trouble maintaining a
WordPress install doesn't mean we should. Time is always limited, and
we have to prioritize. Working with a reputable third party that also
drives development of the same open source software seems like a
perfectly reasonable choice to me in this instance. And BTW - we do
get situations where the blog gets a huge spike of traffic every once
in a while, e.g. during the SOPA/PIPA protest, so hosting it ourselves
is not as effortless as it may seem, without even accounting for
customization requests from our communications team, etc.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation