===In the spirit of redundancy and availability===
A project suggestion:
Develop a completely separate and redundant project to maintain our
own fast, quickly-updated static mirror of Wikipedia content. We
could redirect visitors to this mirror, via DNS if necessary, in case
of any real catastrophe; it would also be useful when the primary site
is slow.
Advantages: it's redundant. Improves catastrophe protection.
Improves availability of data and discussions stored on-wiki. Further
search improvements? '''Could be handled entirely separate from core
cluster work; offloaded onto non-core devs.'''
Disadvantages: it's redundant. More work
===In the spirit of failsafes and backups===
A system to periodically store entire database snapshots (every
month?), to recover from subtle, undetected database corruption. (my
impression was that this is not done already)
--
+sj+