Lukas Mezger wrote:
I am a member of the Wikipedia community and I have
started a project to
reduce the environmental impact of the Wikimedia movement
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact>. The main idea is
to use renewable energy for running the Wikimedia servers and the main
reason for this is that by doing so, Wikipedia can set a great example
for environmental responsibility in the entire internet sector.
This issue has been discussed previously. I would recommend trawling
through the mailing list archives to find older discussions.
A somewhat cynical reply from May 2009:
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051656.html>.
I can't find the rest of that thread off-hand, but surely it's somewhere.
In order to further advance the project, I would like
to learn more about
how much energy Wikipedia's servers use. As far as I can tell, these
figures are not public, but I believe they could very well be.
There's been a greater push for transparency in the past few months. I
think what you want here from the Wikimedia operations team is a full
index of the particular hardware that's in use in the various data
centers. That would allow you or others to take this list of hardware and
research its energy use. Most of the hardware is off-the-shelf from Dell
and other companies, I believe, so information about its specifications,
including energy use, is likely already public.
MZMcBride