I agree, there are a substantial number of etherpads that form part of the public documentation for events and decisions. While some were archived to the wikis, many have not been, and ensuring that these records are archived is a large task that is likely not possible to complete with the less then a month of notice that's been given. A public archive of the entire etherpad database is not feasible due to privacy concerns though.
AntiCompositeNumber (they/them) On Tue, Feb 10, 2026, at 10:23, Antoine Musso via Wikitech-l wrote: > Le 10/02/2026 à 13:56, Jelto Wodstrcil via Ops a écrit : >> Hello everyone >> >> If you don't use etherpad, you can ignore this message. >> >> We will *delete all pads after 1st March 2026*! If you need any of your >> pads, please make a local backup. We will not be able to recover the data >> after 1st March. >> >> The pad cleanup helps to reduce the size of the database and the footprint >> on our infrastructure. After the cleanup, etherpad can still be used for >> real-time collaboration but please do not expect long term storage. >> Additional cleanups might happen after that unannounced. >> >> See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415237 for more information. >> >> Greetings and thank you >> >> Jelto > Hi, > > It seems we never purged EtherPad? > > My former team (platform engineering) took notes there and since we > were aware EtherPad was not a permanent store we copy/pasted the text > to mediawiki.org. > > Then not everyone was aware of the ephemeral state of EtherPad. In the > early days it has been used for note keeping during various events and > meetings. https://www.mediawiki.org/ shows plenty of articles pointing > to EtherPad which would indicate their content were not transferred > toward permanent storage. Or maybe they were and the left over pad got > changed with a link to the wiki page. > > I understand there has been no promise to keep the pads permanently, > then I am not sure people were necessarily aware. I also understand > the challenge of having to support for a huge database table and it is > very legitimate to get rid of it. > > However, I am concerned about the lost of history which might be > valuable for history of the movement. Would it be possible to generate > a static dump of those pads similar to what we did when phasing > Extension:CodeReview? Though there might be privacy concerns since > some pads were not necessarily intended to be public :-\ Or maybe I > am just a data hoarder and like to have archive kept. > > Antoine "hashar" Musso > Wikimedia Release Engineering > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
