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Google Donating Bandwidth and Servers to Wikipedia
Armstr0ng writes "According to Dirson's blog, Google plans to help Wikipedia by donating bandwidth and servers to handle part of their increasing load. In fact, there's an official page of Google's proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects."
It usually is a 10 minute process to login to Wikipedia and call up an edit page. Not to mention that this might help with all of the Slashdottings Wikipedia's servers have to survive;)
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Plenty more people would do so if there were an official mirroring system for Wikipedia, which there is not. All kinds of people would be tripping over themselves to lend bandwidth and servers to them if there were such as process, and IIRC they've gotten offers before from universities and such.
If Google wants to help out, I don't see why they should be get any kind of special access. The ball is not in Google's court, but in Wikipedia's.
(No disrespect to Vibber and the guys keeping the servers at Wikipedia HQ online; they're doing god's work. But the site would probably be a lot more stable with an army of official mirrors than with a single, monolithic server farm.)
Hopefully both of them will disappear. Right now, the only reason they're included is that the internal search engine was overloading the servers.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
More info
Jimbo Wales meets with Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Jimbo Wales, Chair, Founder and life member of the Wikimedia Foundation met with Larry Brin, Co-Founder & President, Products of Google, and Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology of Google in Stanford today to discuss hardware and bandwidth donations from Google to the foundation. According to Anthere, Vice-Chair, Contributing User Representative of the Wikimedia Foundation,
"It is currently proceeding, but details are not entirely worked out. We had a first proposal for which we gave feedback last week. Today, in Standford, Jimbo met with Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who were extremely enthousiastic about the whole project. The board has a meeting planned early march to try to finalize this a little bit more. Ant" [1]
Maveric149, one of the lead developers and most prolific of article contributers continued:
"I don't remember the specifics (ask Jimbo for those), but Google has at least tentatively agreed to give us access to a certain number of dual zeon servers at one or more of their data centers and with unlimited bandwidth. I've been told that there are no strings attached (meaning they don't expect us to do anything for then, such as having GoogleAds).- mav [2]
In short, this is wonderful news. I have helped with our grant applications in the past and, in addition to taking a lot of work, there is barely ever enough money to run what will shortly become one of the top 100 websites on the internet, and the only thing limiting Wikipedia's growth is hardware.
Tomorrow there will be a meeting in IRC to discuss our future grant applications; anyone wanting to hear more should keep glued to the Grants page and stop by http://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia at 4PM UTC on Feb 10 (Sunday)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
And there are processes you can invoke which will stop him doing that. File a request for mediation, present clear evidence that you are right and he is wrong, and bingo, your version of the truth goes there and he will face a ban if he tries to change it back.
You sound suspiciously like all those people who refused to vote last fall and now hang around whining about Bush's policies. THERE ARE SYSTEMS IN PLACE TO LET YOU CHANGE THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE - if you aren't willing to make use of them, quit whining instead.
Ibiblio is already doing a pretty good job with that. Considering that they're on The University of North Carolina's network, which is about as close a hop as you can be to the backbone, bandwidth is pretty solid. Last I checked, ibiblio has 5+ terabytes of disk space and a super kick-ass LVS cluster that should be able to handle just about anything you throw at it.
I think gutenberg's gonna be just fine.
My other computer is your Windows box
No plans for Google ads. We do send search to either Google or Yahoo now when the database servers are under an uncomfortable amount of load. I'm usually the person making that decision and I decide solely based on balancing server load and reduced service.
Instead of static caches we're using Squid caches which get updated automatically when the content changes. We're looking to place more of these in other places which use significant amounts of bandwidth or are far from Florida in response time terms.
We're aware of the risk of excessive dependence on one donor and are looking to avoid it. We're entirely happy to talk with other companies who want to share in being seen to be helping something obviously good, limited only by the suitability of the offers for our needs. I don't know what the Wikimedia Foundation board would say but personally I'm entirely happy to accept hosting from Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL or any other significant player. In my personal opinion, neutral means just that - including neutral toward all companies in the business.
If any competitor is concerned about Google getting undue benefit or prominence, the solution is simple enough: talk with us as well.
We have offers of various sorts in Europe (though more, particularly from major carriers with excellent peering arrangements, would be very welcome) and the US. We don't yet have a substantial offer in Asia and that's a major hole I'd personally love to see filled. We're very popular in Japan and a location with good peering in Japan would be good for service there.
By this time next year I'd like to see 2-6 major remote sites with database slaves and apache web servers, capable of taking over as master if there's a failure in Florida, plus 10-20+ remote Squid caching sites. A massive amount of work (and donations) required to get that done.
We've already been blocked from China ourselves on several occasions. I've little doubt that it'll happen again and in other places as well from time to time.
It's absolutely certain that we have some unknown, uncorrected copyright infringement, offensive content, politically incorrect items for various parts of the world and assorted other things some or many people find undesirable. If the chairman of the board or president of the country is making headlines worldwide for some indiscretion, expect it to be in the article. Nobody who is unduly concerned about such things should consider offering hosting - we can't guarantee the absence of such content, just that we will try to be neutral.
We're not only interested in hosting and bandwidth. I'm particularly interested in high performance disk drives or systems, high capacity RAM modules (database servers like RAM but 32GB of ECC costs $11,000...) or whole high power database servers. To give some idea, I'm thinking in terms of three quad Opterons with 32GB of RAM and 12-16 15,000 RPM SCSI drives to keep up with demand for just the English language encyclopedia project over the next 6-9 months.
No part of this post should be taken as representing the official views of the Wikimedia Foundation or any members of its board. It is, of course, blatant soliciting for donations, as you'd expect from the guy who does much of the capacity planning...:)
Luckily the Wikipedia content is under the GNU FDL, and the database dumps can be downloaded by anyone with enough time & bandwidth. If Google should want to kill Wikipedia, I'm sure someone else (the big Y perhaps) will step forward to host it. By the way, in 3-4 years time.. who knows what the net will look like?