[crosspost from Maps-l]
Today the Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the deprecation of the public
API for Wikimedia map tiles. Around mid October the Foundation will end
support for the Wikimedia Maps Service API [1]. This change affects people
using Wikimedia maps on their own website or app. Maps on the Wikimedia
sites, in Wikimedia-hosted tools and gadgets, and on maps.wikimedia.org
won't be affected.
This decision was made based on recent outage incidents, primarily due to
spikes in third party usage, along with an analysis showing that more than
a third of maps provided are to non-Wikimedia services (including many to
for-profit organizations).
After the most recent incident [2], the service was limited so that only
cached maps tiles would be available. While this protected the servers, it
made the service unpredictable and highlighted the unsustainability of our
tile service. So, we have made the decision to discontinue the maps APIs
for non-Wikimedia users.
This change will allow our teams working on Maps to focus on the
sustainability of the maps used within Wikimedia projects.
You can follow the implementation of this change on Phabricator [3].
Best,
Erica Litrenta
[1] https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/
[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200204-maps
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261424
--
Erica Litrenta
Manager, Community Relations Specialists
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Elitre_(WMF)
Dear MediaWiki community,
We are happy to announce the launch of the mediawikiexperts.blog today. [0]
This blog is meant to bring together the different MediaWiki stakeholders and groups and make their projects visible.
We want to show the wealth of the MediaWiki universe, but also create space for new topics and developments. We want to build a bridge between the many subprojects around MediaWiki and to initiate new cooperations: inside and outside Wikimedia, between organizations and individual community members.
The blog thus fills a gap: At the beginning of the year, we were excited to see the Wikimedia Techblog was launched, which necessarily focuses on Wikimedia. And there are a number of corporate blogs that also necessarily focus on their corporate topics.
But beyond that, we believe, there is still a need for a news portal that promotes MediaWiki and appeals to professional users, maintainers, evangelists, admins and developers.
We want to create a space for use cases and best practices from organizations, whether non-profit or for-profit, for announcements and news from third party developers, for presenting features and extensions from the whole MediaWiki cosmos, for tips and tricks for deployment and configuration, announcing and reporting on events like the Semantic MediaWiki and Enterprise MediaWiki conferences, or tutorials and debates.
So this blog supplements the existing news landscape and should strengthen the network and the ecosystem.
The blog functions as a group blog and articles can be submitted at any time. In the medium term, we hope that an independent editorial team will be formed.
We welcome contributions and ideas for contributions!
Richard
for the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
[0] https://mediawikiexperts.blog/