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Wikimedia Treats Their Operations Like Their Projects

Posted by Soulskill on from the innovative-shenanigans dept.

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."

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. policies by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  2. Not a free-for-all by robla · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not a free-for-all by Xtifr · · Score: 2

      Yeah, it's like saying that Linux is open to anyone. Anyone can download the complete git repo, and make all the changes they want and even share them, via git, but nothing goes into the main branches without the say-so of Linus or one of his lieutenants.

      It sounds like they're basically saying that now, not only is Mediawiki itself open, but so is all the site-specific configuration. But it's open in the same way--you can make your own forks for your own site, but they're not required to accept your changes into their branches for their sites.

      Seems like a pretty sensible way to do things, actually.

    2. Re:Not a free-for-all by Ihmhi · · Score: 2

      I'd love to see a list of the troll posts...

      "Submission 32-12042012153856: replace all hard drives with sticks of butter."

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
  3. Wond3rful! by Tommy+Bologna · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.