Learn why we transitioned the MediaWiki platform to serve traffic from multiple data centers, and the challenges we faced along the way. Wikimedia Foundation provides access to information for people around the globe. When you visit Wikipedia, your browser sends a web request to our servers and receives a response.…
For over 15 years, the Wikimedia Foundation has provided public dumps of the content of all wikis. They are not only useful for archiving or offline reader projects, but can also power tools for semi-automated (or bot) editing such as AutoWikiBrowser. For example, these tools comb through the dumps to…
Thumbor shadow-serving production traffic Wikimedia Commons is our open media repository. Like Wikipedia and its other sister projects, Commons runs on the MediaWiki platform. Commons is home to millions of photos, documents, videos, and other multimedia files. MediaWiki has a built-in imagescaler that, until now, we used in production as…
By Tyler Cipriani Creating a Docker image for your service should be easy—cram your code and its dependencies into a container: boom. done. But that’s never the whole story. You have to build new images for each release, monitor them for vulnerabilities, and find a way to safely ship them…
By Timo Tijhof I’m happy to share that the second Web Perf Hero award of 2022 goes to Valentín Gutierrez! This award is in recognition of Valentín’s work on the Wikimedia CDN over the past three months. In particular, Valentín dove deep into Apache Traffic Server. We use ATS as the…
We are thrilled to share the exciting news that the 2024 Wikimedia Hackathon is scheduled to unfold in the captivating city of Tallinn, Estonia, from May 3rd – 5th 2024! A Celebration of Innovation and Collaboration The Wikimedia Hackathon is not just an annual hacking event, it’s a celebration of…
The new “Excimer UI” option in WikimediaDebug generates flame graphs. What are flame graphs, and when do you need this? A flame graph visualizes a tree of function calls across the codebase, and emphasizes the time each function spends. In 2014, we introduced Arc Lamp to help detect and diagnose…
MediaWiki is the platform that powers Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. There is a lot of traffic to these sites. We want to serve our audience in a way that they get the best experience and performance possible. So efficiency of the MediaWiki platform is of great importance to us…
You might have already heard the buzz: the Wikimedia Hackathon is gearing up for an incredible event in Tallinn, Estonia, from May 3rd to 5th, 2024. Now, we’re thrilled to announce that the Registration form, which also includes an optional Scholarship application, is officially open until Friday January 5th 2024.…
Data is powerful — every business on earth uses data. But some are leveraging it more than others.The problem?Not all businesses are using data ethically.You need to collect, store, and analyse data to grow your business. But, if you aren’t careful, you could be crossing the line with your data…