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Wikimedia Treats Their Operations Like Their Projects
An anonymous reader writes "Wikimedia Foundation is now treating their infrastructure like one of their projects, in that volunteers can edit it. Thanks to Wikimedia Labs, the volunteers can make changes to the infrastructure via puppet and git. After code review, changes can be deployed to production. After years of having no new root or shell-level volunteers, it's now possible for anyone to contribute to how Wikimedia projects are run from an infrastructure perspective."
Anyone care to shed some light on how other monolithic web presences handle similar operations tasks? The facebook's release operations approach was detailed by Ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering.ars/1 , but it doesn't include some other aspects of web operations such as monitoring and generally sharing the load of having tons of machines and lots of developers.
Well, if their infrastructure policies are anything like their editing policies, this should be a real treat to watch. Especially when they get to that bit about how their infrastructure should work according to popular opinion... It's all going to go to hell the first time some csci major tries to make the network fully compliant with the OSI model... they'll have no choice but to rollback any attempt to reverse it because everybody says the OSI model is an accurate representation of a real network. *giggle*
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Great, now they're handling infrastructure by committee. I can see this getting expensive (and broke to fuck) quite quickly. And dibs on how long it'll be before we see a parallel structure to the "editor cabal" problem they already have.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Great, now they're handling infrastructure by committee.
I can see this getting expensive (and broke to fuck) quite quickly.
And dibs on how long it'll be before we see a parallel structure to the "editor cabal" problem they already have.
Well, this is slashdot. A quick check of the article shows that it is 1.5 days old. Newish for the 'dot, but still old. Given all that, I'd say that there is already a cabal well and truly entrenched.
I'm wondering if they'll make "GOTO considered harmful" an explicit policy. WP:GCH?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
And dibs on how long it'll be before we see a parallel structure to the "editor cabal" problem they already have.
Iâ(TM)ll say.
âoeWe canâ(TM)t do it like that because of policy X?â â" âoeWhere does it say that? Who decided that?â â" âoeIt doesnâ(TM)t say that anywhere, and we the cabal decided that policy. Itâ(TM)s not open to discussion; this is not a majority-vote thing.â
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
And dibs on how long it'll be before we see a parallel structure to the "editor cabal" problem they already have.
I'll say.
"We can’t do it like that because of policy X?" -- "Where does it say that? Who decided that?" -- "It doesn’t say that anywhere, and we the cabal decided that policy. It’s not open to discussion; this is not a majority-vote thing."
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Wait, I thought GOTOs => => velociraptors! was already canon? [obligatory xkcd link]
Any changes to the infrastructure need to get reviewed by someone in the Wikimedia Operations staff prior to actually going live, and they tend to be pretty careful about letting things through. Here's the list of changes awaiting review, along with discussion of each proposed change in many cases.
I have just edited the payroll schedule. Nobody at Wikimedia will be paid until 2062, and Jimmy Wales will now be charged $2 for every page view.
Maybe they should have tried to make it more widely known that they needed help in that area before opening it up like that. I'm sure there are people out there would have jumped at the oppurtunity to help out with Wikipedia at that level for the coolness factor.
From /manifests/admins.pp:
....
class admins::analinterns {
Whereas on /. the cabal's policy is NO UTF-8 FOR YOU, which apparently you forgot about...
What could possibly go wrong?
Whereas on /. the cabal's policy is NO UTF-8 FOR YOU, which apparently you forgot about...
Or didn't know about in the first place.
What century are we in again?
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.