[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Environment

Sun Dec 13 01:01:19 UTC 2009

On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> How about moving the servers (5) from Florida to a cold country
> (Alaska, Canada, Finland, Russia) so that they can be used to heat
> offices or homes ? It might not be unrealistic as one may read such
> things as "the solution was to provide nearby homes with our waste
> heat" (6).
>
I imagine the average Wikimedia user is more concerned with whether his
requests are optimized to be fast than with whether they're optimized to be
environmentally friendly.  Or, to add a coat of greenwash, remember that
power consumption is going to be greater if you have more latency.

If the WMF had $130 million lying around, I would rather they used it to
actually serve their mission.

I think Domas hit the nail on the head in May:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051656.html