[Foundation-l] EN Wikipedia Editing Statistics

Mon Dec 1 17:04:10 UTC 2008

2008/12/1 Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
>> On Monday 01 December 2008 04:09:11 Robert Rohde wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>> > Is the data replicated anywhere outside the Tampa data centre (such as
>>> > in Amsterdam or Seoul)? If not, just one fire, flood or hurricane could
>>> > destroy the entire en: Wikipedia.
>>>
>>> There are database mirrors of every wiki, including en, as part of the
>>> toolserver cluster in Amsterdam.
>>
>> Unfortunately, enwiki mirror doesn't include article text :(
>>
>>
> Are you sure about that? Last time I checked the text databases were
> shared between all wikimedia project and thus replicated all at once
> or not at all.
>
>
> Bryan

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Wikimedia-servers-2008-11-10.svg
is a good picture of it. If I'm interpreting it correctly:

* There are the "database servers" running MySQL, which store
metadata. These are split into clusters (en on 1; de + commons +
possibly others on 2; others on 3). I believe these are all located in
Florida.
* These databases (i.e. only metadata) are replicated for the
Toolserver machines located in Amsterdam.
* The actaul wikitext is stored on Apache servers, again I think these
are all in Florida. They are not split into clusters like the database
servers AFAICT.
* There are squids - caching servers - located in Florida, Korea and
Amsterdam (these are not the same as the toolserver machines).

So in other words the whole wikitext for all wikis is not backed up
anywhere except in database dumps. Scary.

the wub