Because the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't make long term strategic decisions
based off of a 4 person discussion on a mailing list.
I really don't know why people keep being surprised by this.
Seddon
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 6:11 PM Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I saw a recent size estimate of Wikimedia Commons of
just over 200 TB.
That's large but not astronomical.
With a bit of guesstimation, the hardware only cost of creating a
Wikimedia projects digital tape archive might be around $2,000 per
archive set, a cost that probably would only be once a year. Using
off-the-shelf kit, a similar archive on a set of 10 TB hard disks
might end up being double that cost. Archives like this are good for a
few years, but in practice a plan would have them periodically tested
and refreshed, unless they are being replaced every year with the
latest archive.
It is unclear to me why the WMF would not want to make a hearty
transparent and public commitment to off-site archives. At least with
an independently managed archive in another country, that at least
makes it possible that in some bizarre scenario where an extremist US
government makes it a federal crime to fail to either 'amend' the
Wikimedia database against the values of the WMF, or legally orders
the WMF to take down its websites in order to control certain
publications, videos or photographs, that WMF employees can
appropriately comply with US federal law, but are not be required to
do anything about the public archive hosted by a different
organization in another country. If such an unlikely scenario came to
pass (and the unexpected seems to becoming something to realistically
plan for these days), at least the archive could be resurrected for
public access within a few weeks by open knowledge organizations who
have staff that would never be subject to federal law in the US.
If the WMF honestly does not already do something like this already,
and wanted to earmark the relatively trivial sum of $10,000/year for
remote archives, us volunteers would be happy to approach a couple of
suitable national-level partners in Europe that could easily
physically host the archives each year and would probably like the
idea of blogging about it, as protecting open knowledge fits their
values and commitments.
Any WMF board members interested in asking some questions internally,
if the WMF senior management are unwilling to answer this rather
simple question publicly?
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 14:36, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think that raising the question here is fine. I also think that it is
more WMF's responsibility to be responsive than community members'
responsibility to guess where and how to ask questions.
In general (this is not intended as a criticism of you, Dan) my view is
that WMF has a very mixed record on responsiveness. Some employees and
board members repeatedly go above and beyond the call of duty, while
other
employees and board members ignore repeated
questions, and some people
are
in between. The first group seems to me to
deserve a lot of credit, while
second group comes across to me as disrespectful and lazy. I have
previously complained about problems with responsiveness to multiple
managers in WMF, and unfortunately that has not resulted in widespread
improvements that I have observed. I think that the problem may have more
to do with organizational culture and lack of will than with lack of
capacity. Let me emphasize that unresponsiveness is not a problem with
everyone in WMF, but I think that it is a significant problem and I know
of
no excuses for it.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Tue, May 7, 2019, 10:50 Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Tue 7 May 2019 at 11:04, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I am sure this Wikimedia wide community run list is a perfectly good
> place
> > to check whether the WMF has any commitment to long term public
archives,
> > or not.
> >
> > Thanks for your advice as to where to go, but the strategy process
groups
are undoubtedly a worse place to ask this question and
expect a
verifiable
answer.
I see! Then I will defer to your clear expertise in getting definitive
answers. I look forward to seeing the outcome!
Dan
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Seddon
*Community and Audience Engagement Associate*
*Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*