Wikimedia Blog
blog.wikimedia.org · Company blog · on HN since 2009
The Wikimedia Foundation's blog reports on Wikipedia's technical work and policy, including infrastructure, HTTPS, search and link repair.
What HN saysHN links it for engineering updates like the Internet Archive broken-link project, Wikipedia Zero and net neutrality, and the REST API.
177HN people shared it
45linked it in comments
320stories submitted
7.0Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB7 people · 167 points · first shared 2013 · 38 comments on HN
- 2Wikipedia Zero and Net Neutrality: Protecting the Internet as a Public Space6 people · 92 points · first shared 2014 · 38 comments on HN
- 3The future of HTTPS on Wikimedia projects5 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 4Wikipedia and Internet Archive partner to fix 1M broken links on Wikipedia3 people · 494 points · first shared 2016 · 101 comments on HN
- 5How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast3 people · 373 points · first shared 2014 · 132 comments on HN
- 6Making our pageview data easily accessible3 people · 29 points · first shared 2015 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Parsoid: how Wikipedia catches up with the Web3 people · 16 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Wikimedia moving to Elasticsearch3 people · 13 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Court of Appeals Allows Wikimedia Foundation V. NSA to Proceed3 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10Announcing Keyholder a shared ssh-agent proxy3 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11The Met's new open access initiative puts 375k images under CC03 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 12Swedish court rules against free access to public art online3 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 13Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA2 people · 585 points · first shared 2015 · 130 comments on HN
- 14Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA2 people · 258 points · first shared 2017 · 104 comments on HN
- 15Transfer of Wikipedia sites from GoDaddy complete2 people · 212 points · first shared 2012 · 12 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
schwag09 · 2017-04-04
Project: R.I.P.Link - a tool for finding dead links on the web[0].
The inspiration for this project came from Wikipedia and the Internet Archive partnering to fix broken links on Wikipedia[1]. After briefly searching around I couldn't find any great tools for this, and I decided it would be an interesting side-project. I was also looking for a good medium-size project to improve my Go skills and understanding of concurrent programming.
From here I'd like to implement recursive searching functionality and depth limiting. I think this would greatly improve the appeal of the tool.
* [0] https://github.com/mschwager/riplink
* [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broken-links/
GFK_of_xmaspast · 2016-03-27
> Love how she admits that she started everything after being a troll herself
Are you referring to the entry she wrote about her sister, because personally I'm seeing a bit of daylight between "literal twelve year old child makes a fake wiki article" and "Throwaway email addresses frequently send her requests for dates, condescendingly discuss her body, insinuate that she got to where she is through sexual favors, ask her to reserve those favors for themselves, and when she doesn’t reply, they spew profanities." (from: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/03/08/alchemy-turning-harassment-into-w…
philipn · 2014-11-26
This is an interesting topic, but kind of a weird article. Wikipedia wrote a long article addressing the topic of Net Neutrality and Wikipedia Zero a few months back. This is worth reading if you're interested in the topic:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutralit…
Kind of odd that the Washington Post doesn't mention any of these points. Personally, I still feel the Wikipedia Zero program violates net neutrality, but mentioning Wikipedia's self-imposed constraints here seems important.
gwern · 2011-07-05
I'll quote myself from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/28/data-competition-announcing-the-w… about the competition:
Reading more, I’m pretty troubled by the selection of data: http://www.kaggle.com/c/wikichallenge/forums/t/674/sampling-approach
What’s the point of predicting only about recent editors, whose ranks have already been thoroughly harrowed by the endless tightening of policy and rise of deletionists? Wikipedia already has a horrendous reputation for screwing over contributors, so anyone who does much editing (and whose departure would be noticed by the criterion) is self-selecting now.
just the other day cryonics researcher Mike Darwin told me he had no interest in contributing because he was sure all his contributions would be reverted under an extremely narrow reading of WP:RS, and wondered whether his BLP article could just be deleted since he certainly wasn’t going to edit it into an article worth a damn
gabrielsroka · 2024-06-22
It's from 2017
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/wikimedia-rest-api/
tyingq · 2019-12-11
There's at least one that does.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12/google_mariadb_mysql_migratio…
And Wikipedia: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariadb/
bjelkeman-again · 2019-12-01
In Sweden the highest court ruled that the distribution of photographs of public art is a breach of copyright. Wikimedia got sued and lost.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/25/wikimedia-sweden-freedom-panoram…
hkeide · 2019-02-05
If this doesn't impact non-profits, why do you think Wikimedia is against it? Are they simply uninformed?
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/06/29/eu-copyright-proposal-will-hurt-…
EGreg · 2018-11-29
Tell me, why has Wikipedia been able to maintain such high quality in spite of being a honeypot for misinformation efforts like tripling of elephants?
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/09/08/colberts-complicated-relationshi…
Doctor_Fegg · 2018-07-14
Here's exactly that in action:
- https://openmaptiles.org/languages/native/#0.88/0/0
- https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/06/28/interactive-maps-now-in-your-lan…
jay-anderson · 2018-07-10
Agreed. It's annoying that we need special permissions on old public domain artwork. Depending on where you're at they can't prevent you from using it freely. In the US at least there is precedent that exact digital copies of public domain works are not able to receive copyright protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp). Though this isn't universal throughout the world (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/25/wikimedia-sweden-freedom-panoram…
mezzode · 2018-04-23
I opted into the beta for this way back and have been using it for ages, it was pretty surprising finding out it only just went into wide release. Given how useful I found it I'd have thought it would have been released pretty quickly even when not perfect, but given the results can't complain.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-available-as-a-be…
mavidser · 2018-04-23
I too was surprised by the date, given that I've been using it for the past year, at least, or more.
Apparently, it went into beta in 2014[1].
[1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-available-as-a-be…
cooper12 · 2018-02-19
Wikimedia has always been in favor of net neutrality, it's just that their role in the issue was always muddled by zero rating. From 2014:
> The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet. (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutralit…
In that article they also discuss how they reconcile net neutrality with Wikimedia Zero. From December 2017:
> Net neutrality is essential for access to knowledge (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/04/net-neutrality-access-to-knowled…
Regarding Wikipedia strongly supporting net neutrality, I'm not sure I would agree considering it didn't participate in the day of action on December 12. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Action_to_Save_Net_Neutrality)
brutal_chaos · 2017-11-28
From the referenced Wikimedia blog post[0] Wikimedia states, "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet." Perhaps the concept is an evolution of Net Neutrality with the allowance of free distribution of necessities (knowledge in the case of Wikimedia), emergency services, &c.
[0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutralit…
rgbrenner · 2017-11-28
reading wikipedia blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutralit…
"We believe that free access to public interest resources can be provided in a manner that keeps the playing field level and avoids net neutrality issues."
The program is partnering with carriers to give away access to Wikipedia (although no money is exchanged between the carrier and Wikipedia). It doesn't sound like it avoids NN issues. Giving away access to a certain website.. sounds exactly like an NN issue.
And I don't think Wikipedia's competitors would think this "keeps the playing field level" either. How would they compete against Wikipedia, when their users have to pay to access their service, but dont have to pay to access wikipedia?
Wasn't this the same issue we had with Facebook's Zero program in India?
dllu · 2017-11-22
Some organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, and Facebook believe that their services are more important than others. As such, they consider themselves deserving of cheaper, free, or the "fast lane" internet, especially in less developed areas without sufficient infrastructure to serve all websites. The rationale is that providing a limited set of websites for free is better than if those areas have no access to internet at all.
Note: The views of the mentioned organizations do not necessarily reflect my own views.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics
[1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net-neutralit…
Wittylama · 2017-05-26
Wikipedians in Australia are running banners to raise awareness that they ALREADY benefit from Fair Use; that schools must pay to use freely accessible websites; and that common activities like sharing memes or just forwarding an email is technically not allowed. Blogpost:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/22/australia-fair-use/
Aussies are encouraged to write to their MP at https://www.faircopyright.org.au/take-action/#emailform
Social media on: #FairCopyrightOz
The_ed17 · 2017-03-01
That's already a thing. :-) https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/11/kiwix-ten-years/
davidgerard · 2017-02-08
CC0 is a legally formalised version of public domain, and this can be useful.
The partnerships are to get the word out and make the images readily available for use, so they do the job of spreading the works and publicising the works and the museum. Wikimedia blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/the-met-public-art-creative-comm… tl;dr this is actually pretty awesome, and we have a Wikimedian In Residence there to help.
bzbarsky · 2016-12-12
> How are external links in Wikipedia articles maintained?
Until recently, "not very well". Recently, they have been doing https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broken-links/
drakonandor · 2016-10-28
and they want it to be the rule globally
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/19/petition-right-to-be-forgotten/
atdt · 2016-04-28
There is a better (and more comprehensive and accurate) API for page view data now: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-accessible/ , API specs at https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc#/Pageviews_data
_joe · 2016-04-24
The total number of requests that get through the cache to the application layer can be seen here
https://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/stacked.php?m=ap_rps&c=Applic…
which you can see is not showing any substantial increase due to the passing of Prince. The big hole of two days that ends just before the news broke is due to wikimedia switching traffic to a second datacenter for two days, see http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/04/18/wikimedia-server-switch/
driverdan · 2016-04-06
Mods: consider switching this from the original blogspam to Wikimedia's blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/04/04/strike-against-freedom-panorama/
swatthatfly · 2016-01-08
This blog post gives the actual details: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-spe…
e12e · 2015-08-19
I'd also like to see a reference to wikipedia running on postgresql. The mediawiki software platform supports running on postgresql[1] -- but it appears the wikipedia has been running on MySQL prior to migrating to MariaDB:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariadb/
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:PostgreSQL
barosl · 2015-05-15
Two points:
- Performance is important even for web applications. For example, after migrating to HHVM, Wikipedia could buy less servers, serve pages faster, and reduce latency.[1] Rust is fast, even compared to other statically compiled languages.
- Safety is also good to have for web development. I personally find it difficult to refactor my Python web applications. This isn't necessarily an advantage of Rust solely, statically typed languages tend to have this property more or less. But Rust does provide more guarantees than ordinary languages do.
[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twi…
sitic · 2015-03-10
The technical solution can not solve all problems, wikimedia plans to activate HTTPS per default for all users: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/
One of the problems is that certain countries block HTTPS (e.g. China), should wikimedia effectively block all chinese users from free knowledge that wikimedia aims to provide? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
fragmede · 2015-03-10
The EFF is surprisingly absent from this coalition. The other organizations listed as participating are:
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, Pen American Center, Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and Washington Office on Latin America.
From: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/03/10/wikimedia-v-nsa/#cite_note-2