June 2021 Datacenter Switchover
In June 2021, most user traffic was switched from our primary Virginia datacenter to our secondary one in Texas. This post covers how the swtichover went and the issues that came up.
Recent Posts
The rollout of single-sign-on (SSO) at the Wikimedia Foundation
This is the second part of a three part series on the rollout of single-sign-on (SSO) at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimania 2021 Hackathon: 24 hours to experiment with other Wikimedians
The Wikimania 2021 hackathon will take place on the first day of the remote Wikimania 2021, starting August 13th at 5:00 UTC and lasting for 24 hours.
Introducing Database as a Service on Cloud VPS
This post introduces a new service, Database as a service, on Cloud VPS.
Alone together: Wikimedia Hackathon 2021
MediaWiki’s 2021 Hackathon brought participants from all over the globe together online. This post explored the event and its outcomes.
Discovering and fixing CVE-2021-33038 in Mailman3
During Wikimedia’s Mailman3 migration, we discovered and fixed a security issue that would have disclosed the contents of private list archives during the import process. This post explains the issue, how we discovered it and how it was fixed.
Searching for Wikipedia
How people use Search to access Wikipedia is a common question by researchers. Until now, however, there has been little data available about this relationship. To help address these questions, the Wikimedia Foundation is releasing a new, faceted dataset on search engine traffic to Wikipedia so you can ask questions like “What is the most common search engine in my country?” or “Which search engine is most-used by Android users?”
Outreachy round 21: experiences and outcomes
Wikimedia’s participation in Outreachy Round 21 focused on projects related to data science and engineering. In this post, the interns share the outcomes and experiences of their projects.
Upgrading Hadoop in just one day
The Wikimedia Analytics Engineering team manages multiple systems, all gravitating around a big (for our standards) Hadoop cluster. This post describes our path to changing our Hadoop distribution in a single day, together with the lessons learned while doing it.
Wikimedia SSO: Evaluation
In the first of three posts about the implementation of Single Sign On (SSO). This post looks at the original landscape of Wikimedia’s web-based services, summarizes requirements for a new SSO provider, looks at existing FLOSS solutions, and explains why Apereo CAS was chosen.