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<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server_switch_2020>
The Wikimedia Foundation <https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/> will be
testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and
the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make
sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do
a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one
datacenter to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and
to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on *Tuesday,
September 1st 2020*.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:What_is_MediaWiki%3F>, all editing
must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and
we are working to minimize it in the future.
*You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of
time.*
- You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September
1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC
<https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20200901T14>
(15:00
BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New
Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
- If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error
message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we
can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until
everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit.
But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
*Other effects*:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links
might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is
already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual.
Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020.
Non-essential code deployments will not happen.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at
wikitech.wikimedia.org
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Switch_Datacenter#Schedule_for_2018_switch>.
Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more
notifications about this. *Please share this information with your
community.*
Let me know if you have any questions!
--
Benoît Evellin - Trizek (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>