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.
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@davidgerard @luis_in_brief @bvibber Wikipedia, but decentralised!
@davidgerard @bvibber @iain I would settle for “robustly and independently mirrored” right now.
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@davidgerard @bvibber @iain I would settle for “robustly and independently mirrored” right now.
@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
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@davidgerard @luis_in_brief i do not have numbers offhand, but wmf annual budget is a strict upper bound
@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 🤪
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@Profpatsch @luis_in_brief there isnt even any mirror at all of the media files. No one wants to bear that cost.
@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.
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@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.
@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.
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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.
@luis_in_brief Honestly I wouldn't even oppose mirrors hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation themselves. wikipedia.ph, wikipedia.is, wikipedia.gl, etc.
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@luis_in_brief Honestly I wouldn't even oppose mirrors hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation themselves. wikipedia.ph, wikipedia.is, wikipedia.gl, etc.
@raulmatias no, that’s a worst-case scenario: exposes WMF to local laws/pressure, and keeps WMF as a single point of failure.
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@luis_in_brief Honestly I wouldn't even oppose mirrors hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation themselves. wikipedia.ph, wikipedia.is, wikipedia.gl, etc.
@luis_in_brief Possibly with data being served from different data centers located in different countries for each domain.
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@raulmatias no, that’s a worst-case scenario: exposes WMF to local laws/pressure, and keeps WMF as a single point of failure.
@luis_in_brief
>local laws/pressure.is is pretty much bulletproof, not sure about .ph and .gl.
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@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.
@raulmatias @Profpatsch @luis_in_brief yes, I know all this. 20+ year mediawiki dev here
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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.
@luis_in_brief true
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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.
@luis_in_brief Just as #OpenStreetMap 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.
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@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.
@woozle @TheDJ @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief Kiwix and zim archives
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@luis_in_brief Just as #OpenStreetMap 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.
@simon yes, that’s why I said mirror and not fork, thanks for assuming I’m an idiot
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@simon yes, that’s why I said mirror and not fork, thanks for assuming I’m an idiot
@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.
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