<![CDATA[The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016.]]>The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016.

The second-best time is today.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/topic/bc7c3d96-5026-44ca-9199-23f87fdc717e/the-best-time-for-a-european-organization-to-start-building-an-independent-european-mirror-of-wikipedia-not-reliant-on-the-us-or-wmf-was-in-december-2016.RSS for NodeSun, 14 Jun 2026 15:00:05 GMTSat, 13 Jun 2026 16:51:58 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:36:28 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief once you get cut off the semantic difference goes away.

This isn't just a fine point, it tells you what you really need to get control off is the WMF.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://en.osm.town/users/simon/statuses/116746838899498638https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://en.osm.town/users/simon/statuses/116746838899498638Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:36:28 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:41:35 GMT]]>@simon yes, that’s why I said mirror and not fork, thanks for assuming I’m an idiot

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116746623115577668https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116746623115577668Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:41:35 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:59:28 GMT]]>@woozle @TheDJ @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief Kiwix and zim archives

https://mstdn.social/@bweller/116647411406077863

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/users/bweller/statuses/116746457458593548https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/users/bweller/statuses/116746457458593548Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:59:28 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:06:28 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief Just as Wikipedia is legally forkable but not in practical terms because you can't clone the contributor community. Without that you just end up with a stale copy.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://en.osm.town/users/simon/statuses/116745541302245598https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://en.osm.town/users/simon/statuses/116745541302245598Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:06:28 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:09:22 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief true

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/ap/users/116614281190180916/statuses/116745316750071571https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/ap/users/116614281190180916/statuses/116745316750071571Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:09:22 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:12:43 GMT]]>@raulmatias @Profpatsch @luis_in_brief yes, I know all this. 20+ year mediawiki dev here 😉

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116745093983001911https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116745093983001911Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:12:43 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:03:41 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief
>local laws/pressure

.is is pretty much bulletproof, not sure about .ph and .gl.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745058460353646https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745058460353646Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:03:41 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:01:28 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief Possibly with data being served from different data centers located in different countries for each domain.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745049743735579https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745049743735579Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:01:28 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:01:20 GMT]]>@raulmatias no, that’s a worst-case scenario: exposes WMF to local laws/pressure, and keeps WMF as a single point of failure.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116745049219777116https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116745049219777116Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:01:20 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:57:00 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief Honestly I wouldn't even oppose mirrors hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation themselves. wikipedia.ph, wikipedia.is, wikipedia.gl, etc.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745032208440257https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745032208440257Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:57:00 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:53:15 GMT]]>@TheDJ @Profpatsch @luis_in_brief Getting the thumbnails will be a problem, because the last dump of all media files is 13 years old <https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/wikimedia/images/wikipedia/commons/f/>, but I guess it's possible to just rip them off a "maxi" Kiwix dump. These only have files used in articles, though.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745017469933175https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116745017469933175Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:53:15 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:45:55 GMT]]>@TheDJ @Profpatsch @luis_in_brief A read-only mirror with all pages and all pages' revisions (approximately 5-10 TB, including talk pages, user pages, etc) and thumbnails of all used files hosted locally would be a few hundred TB at most (the entirety of Wikimedia Commons is just ~1 PB <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics>, and that's all files ever uploaded to Wikimedia servers with their original sizes and revision history); not very much.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116744988599376851https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mstdn.social/ap/users/116238961427035612/statuses/116744988599376851Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:45:55 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:37:01 GMT]]>@bvibber @davidgerard also good news, traffic is falling off a cliff so even if your goal were to split traffic 50-50 with the official site (unlikely for a variety of reasons) that’s 20% less outbound bandwidth to pay for than this time last year 🤪

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744953619423153https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744953619423153Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:37:01 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:14:53 GMT]]>@luis_in_brief @davidgerard my strategy is downloading the text only archive every so often and putting it on my NAS, but that's not exactly a scalable solution

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://kolektiva.social/users/iain/statuses/116744630648180398https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://kolektiva.social/users/iain/statuses/116744630648180398Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:14:53 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:51:10 GMT]]>@davidgerard @bvibber @iain I would settle for “robustly and independently mirrored” right now.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744537384889855https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744537384889855Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:51:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:40:57 GMT]]>@TheDJ @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief

I'd say the primary goal should be a read-only mirror. Once you've got that, you've got defense against WP going dark, becoming inaccessible, or having stuff deleted by political edict -- and can move forward with additional pieces (editability, development...) once any significant shoes drop.

You wouldn't need an org anything like the size of MediaWiki just for that. At a glance, I'd say it's within reach of a modestly wealthy individual or a small org.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://toot.cat/users/woozle/statuses/116744497262080030https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://toot.cat/users/woozle/statuses/116744497262080030Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:40:57 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:20:46 GMT]]>@Profpatsch there are no deliberate, complete, formal mirrors that I know of. Archive might have one?

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744417864478372https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744417864478372Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:20:46 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:14:37 GMT]]>@davidgerard @bvibber @gedankenstuecke yeah, there’s a lot of things that could be done very differently (and very incrementally) if you’re trying to make Wikipedia independently available rather than cloning WMF.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744393703774326https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://social.coop/users/luis_in_brief/statuses/116744393703774326Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:14:37 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:43:50 GMT]]>@TheDJ
Do you mind if I ask what you mean with 'all the process'?

@Profpatsch @luis_in_brief

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.green/users/JohanEmpa/statuses/116744272664059617https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.green/users/JohanEmpa/statuses/116744272664059617Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:43:50 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:37:44 GMT]]>@davidgerard @luis_in_brief @bvibber Wikipedia, but decentralised!

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://kolektiva.social/users/iain/statuses/116744248635727919https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://kolektiva.social/users/iain/statuses/116744248635727919Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:37:44 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:52:32 GMT]]>@Profpatsch @luis_in_brief the mirrors also largely exclude all the process behind what the audience sees. And that process is probably more important to mirror than the raw ‘ready’ latest version of ‘some’ of the content.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744070893017369https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744070893017369Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:52:32 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:51:12 GMT]]>@Profpatsch @luis_in_brief there isnt even any mirror at all of the media files. No one wants to bear that cost.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744065676144142https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744065676144142Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:51:12 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:49:17 GMT]]>Cost goes into starting an org and hiring. Custom mirror engineering, immediate legal costs over content disputes and ddos defense.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744058159143506https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744058159143506Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:49:17 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016. on Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:49:17 GMT]]>@bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief my back of the envelope guess would be about 3 million a year for an org to run a reliable dark archive and 8 million a year to actually start running something that you could visit (not edit). and those numbers assume the foundation is still doing its job next to what the eu side would be doing and assumes a redundant, non-US, sovereign cloud or self hosted solution.
Only gets more expensive after that.

]]>https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744058113772769https://forum.fedi.dk/post/https://mastodon.social/users/TheDJ/statuses/116744058113772769Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:49:17 GMT