[Foundation-l] Legal implications of hosting wikis outside of United States?

Wed Aug 3 20:13:27 UTC 2005

Delirium (delirium at hackish.org) [050804 01:55]:
> Brion Vibber wrote:

> >What would be the legal implications of serving some content from
> >outside of the United States, in comparison to merely running them
> >through a local caching proxy?

> It would certainly make things more complex than having them all in one 
> country.  Is there really any benefit to introducing the added 
> complexity?  London to New York ping times are around 60-80 milliseconds 
> roundtrip, so physical location isn't even noticeable compared to the 
> other sources of latency.

Indeed. And given UK libel laws, there is NO WAY ON EARTH I'd want to see a
Wikimedia database hosted in the UK.

What's our reader:editor ratio, 50:1? (Are there stats available per wiki?)
Logged-in page views mostly aren't cached, but if we have enough readers it
should still help. How helpful have the French and Dutch squids been to
serving European readers efficiently?

- d.