Re: [Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[James Salsman]

Were there any objections to my request below?

Can we also please hire additional database, system, and if necessary
network administration support to make sure that the third party spam
prevention bot infrastructure is supported more robustly in the future?

On Monday, December 14, 2015, James Salsman  wrote:

> Hi Giles,
>
> I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as
> scheduled.
>
> In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
> reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
> again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This data
> is essential in maintaining an audit trail of references as long as
> the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively, allowing those
> who inherit domains to censor them, even if they have already been
> used as a reference in Wikipedia. Keeping the cache is absolutely a
> fair use right in the US, in both statutory and case law, and it is
> essential to be able to track down patterns of attempts at deceptive
> editing to address quality concerns around deliberately biased editing
> such as paid editing. Because of the sensitivity of this goal, the
> Foundation should certainly bear the risk of hosting the reflinks
> cache. However, in the past, 20 TB was considered excessive, even
> though the cost was shown to be less than $5000 without whatever Dell
> NSA-enabled hardware you usually buy.
>
> Would you please reach out to en:User:Dispenser and offer them the
> 20TB hosting solution they need for the Foundation to bear the risk of
> the reflinks cache?  Thank you for your kind consideration.
>
> Best regards,
> Jim
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[James Salsman]

Hi Giles,

I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as scheduled.

In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This data
is essential in maintaining an audit trail of references as long as
the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively, allowing those
who inherit domains to censor them, even if they have already been
used as a reference in Wikipedia. Keeping the cache is absolutely a
fair use right in the US, in both statutory and case law, and it is
essential to be able to track down patterns of attempts at deceptive
editing to address quality concerns around deliberately biased editing
such as paid editing. Because of the sensitivity of this goal, the
Foundation should certainly bear the risk of hosting the reflinks
cache. However, in the past, 20 TB was considered excessive, even
though the cost was shown to be less than $5000 without whatever Dell
NSA-enabled hardware you usually buy.

Would you please reach out to en:User:Dispenser and offer them the
20TB hosting solution they need for the Foundation to bear the risk of
the reflinks cache?  Thank you for your kind consideration.

Best regards,
Jim

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[Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[Gilles Dubuc]

As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the
developer summit, I am hosting two IRC office hours back to back [2] on
December 21st from 20:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC.

The previous office hour [3] focused on ways to reconnect to the shared
hosting community. This time two very different topics will be discussed.

*The open questions in the descriptions below are by no means meant to be
exhaustive, nor are they expected to be fully answered by the end of those
office hours. They are just examples to clarify the context of the titles.*

*Shared hosting technical alternatives*

During the last office hour on the topic of non-technical mediawiki
installs, people seemed very eager to discuss new technical solutions that
could offer a viable alternative to shared hosting.

Could new technologies like containers allow for performance/cost ratios
comparable to shared hosting? If not, how big would the penalty be? How
much maintenance would we have to do to keep deployment on such platforms
up to date?

Shared hosting has always suffered from the fact that it's not used at the
WMF and therefore only maintained on a volunteer basis. How would things be
different with new tech?

*Shared hosting support definition*

Shared hosting usage is already a reality and we should do a better job
accounting for it. Currently mediawiki contributors have no visibility in
what should be supported and to what degree. Our browser support is graded
and very clear, meanwhile our server-side support is not:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility

Should we model our server-side compatibility guidelines on the graded
system we have for browsers? If so, what would that look like? How could we
break down "shared hosting support" into more discreet server-side
capabilities?


[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.2015-11-19-19.00.html
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