Wikimedia sites will go into read-only mode twice this week

Translate this post

Photo by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Photo by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April. On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can’t guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April. No non-essential code deployments will take place.

This test was originally planned to take place on 22 March. 19 and 21 April are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.
Sherry Snyder/Whatamidoing (WMF)
Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

20 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Thank you

The old is particularly good.

God bless America!

1 hour left before the “big freeze” of Wikimedia!

Never stop a running system

All the best.

Tous mes voeux… = all the best

Viva the new wiki data center 😉

Its Okay and I’m fine with the system.I don’t have any trouble with.

جميل, نحو الأفضل دائماً

I just noticed a slight slowdown in mass patrolling after the data center switch…

hoping i see you to search 4 wiki…!
love wiki

!I am from Russia! Goood! lOve

Wikimedia is undermining its credibility by intentionally putting a photo of a black man next to a server rack only so to imply that racial differences in intelligence are non-existent or environmental (i.e., that black people are as technologically capable as white people). It’s not worth it, people. It’s short-sighted.

“This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster”
It’ll take more than a shiny new data centre to unravel the disaster that is Jimmy Wales and pretty much the remainder of the WMF board.

Привіт всім!
Все в рідонлі, як і писали! ;-0 Ок. Чекаємо пів-години і ВПЕРЕД! Ж-)

thanks to Wikipedia,it makes studying quiet easy and possible for anyone who’s willing to learn.

@Ixdv
FYI, that is a picture Papaul Tshibamba, their data engineer, not just “a black man”

[…] which you can see is not showing any substantial increase due to the passing of Prince. The big hole of two days that ends just before the news broke is due to wikimedia switching traffic to a second datacenter for two days, see http://diff.wikimedia.org/2016/04/18/wikimedia-server-switch… […]

@AreYouKidding
I am aware. I am also aware, as are you and everyone else, that this is irrelevant. This photo has not been chosen innocently, or just to post the man. Any other of the, IIRC, three engineers could have been posted. Or no one at all. Or just a rack. Or a graph. Or anything at all that’s more informative. Instead, he was, in a quite objectifying manner, chosen to contribute to the impression I described.