(And I did run it past a pile of WMF techies before posting it originally …)

With 16Mbps link it is possible to synchronize file repository (images and so on) in less than 20 days.

BTW, backups are not just about disaster recovery, but, also, about doing something useful with them. Like categorizing and describing images may be. If we have a client program for such purpose, similar to Google Picassa, but also connected to Wikipedia, we would be able to have millions of copies of everything. In a couple of years, updating Wikipedia (and Commons, and Wikibooks, and…) may become the same sort of thing like updating Debian. And we need P2P implementation for that.

Rewriting the policy basis to make it coherent would be a good thing. Not pretending that the notions that work in a small community scale up well would be another. Also, deciding *what it is* would help. Citizendium has the advantage there: it knows what it wants to be. Wikipedia suffers a lot from lack of direction, and from the vagueness of principle that underlies it.

And losing Jimbo, who is a total dead weight on the project, would be a positive. A thousand courtiers clapping when the emperor fucks something up doesn’t make it less of a fuckup.

i used to download nld:, nl: and af: text-wikis every Q, if it is a service to the wiki community I am willing to consider backups of commons, provided we can work out a good way to download them.

I have long joked that the admin politics on English Wikipedia are silly because the developers hold all the real power. However, I’m increasingly thinking that developers are critical to the content surviving and continuing to be worked on - that improving MediaWiki is the vitally important thing. And even though content writers love Wikipedia and flock to it, developers aren’t. Hence my frequent attempts to recruit anyone working on customising MediaWiki to their ends to contribute back to the main stream of development.

The idea of rebooting the English Wikipedia community - delete most or all of the Wikipedia: page space and start over - is appealing to more than a few people. Perhaps they all grew up in the 1980s and remember the Cold War feeling of comfortable doom. In any case, anyone wanting to destroy Wikipedia only has until the next good database dump ;-)

In private industry, I have always trusted Sungard (http://www.availability.sungard.com/). This may not be optimal for Wikimedia.

Perhaps the simplest thing is to spread the servers around the country similar to Google’s “borg cube” strategy.

-Jason Potkanski

Failure is not inevitable, but planning for it is still prudent. This post is a thoughtful writeup.

-George

A mere 300 bucks buys you a 1TB external hard drive, and that should be more than enough to store the history of all Wikipedias and all images. Affordable hard drive space grows faster than Wikipedia.

My worst case scenario: the board invites a couple of people to get “outside perspectives”, and those outsiders determine that running ads on Wikipedia would be a good fund raising idea. Overnight this creates thousands of highly determined vandals with inside knowledge and the project dies.

Axel

I always thought Wikipedia performed its backups following the example of Linus Torvalds: allow the Internet to copy the work. At least the current versions of each article could be restored. Recovering the previous versions would probably be far more difficult.

Geoff

Very interesting write-up. I wish Wikipedia the best.

One minor point– Google.org is a “for-profit charity”, not a 501(c)(3) and as such couldn’t merge with a 501(c)(3).

Sincerely,
Mike