Reliable sources for Wikimedia in the time of Minnesota in Winter

There are government engineered riots in the streets of Minnesota, people are dying. The sources for what transpires; the traditional sources of repute are suspect. Government sources deliberately polish what transpires to the extend that its lies are obvious given video documentation showing proof of the opposite. News cooperations operate on the basis of "balanced reporting" consequently obvious falsehoods get equal attention invalidating reliability for these traditional sources.

The best that can be said about USA government publications is that it publishes its policy however it no longer provides us with a reliable source. It no longer has the organisations that had a quality making their publications qualify as reliable. Examples abound; think health, climate, traffic, trade, military.

Wikimedia serves a global public. Arguably foreign sources became more reliable and respectable, more likely to provide a narrative that clashes with what some in the USA expect to hear. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is an organisation based in the United States, its infrastructure is centred in the USA. I fear for for the continuity of its products and its quality. It is not a given that this will remain given a US government going to court with the BBC because of what it considers partisan reporting. Wikimedia aims to provide a neutral point of view but given that its traditional sources are increasingly suspect, that it operates in an environment that is no longer free. Given that its bias is also in what it does not cover, I wonder how we measure Wikipedia as a reliable source.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikimedia and its content delivery

The #vision is "share in the sum of all knowledge" and all our projects contain a wealth of information. The infra structure, the software that brings this information is at this time very much centred on the two ends of delivery. It is in the data centres and it is in the last mile.

The effort of the last mile is the Wikipedia Zero project; This wonderful project brings information at no cost to the mobile phones of people who use the services of cooperating mobile operators. The content they use comes from the WMF datacentres in the USA and, that is suboptimal.

It is suboptimal because it takes time to get that data from the first world data centres of the WMF. It is suboptimal because the pipes are often oversubscribed. The consequence is that the service is not as good as it easily could be.

With a "content delivery network", this information is kept locally and it is only the updates that have to come and go all the way to the central servers in the USA.  This is a lot less data for those pipes, it is a lot cheaper to operate for our cooperating mobile operators in Wikipedia Zero and the quality of service will improve a lot.

There are no technical reasons why the WMF cannot do this. All that I see is personal preferences and possibly some legal issues. The WMF has the experience because of its servers in Amsterdam. It should be relatively easy to mimic this at the sites of our cooperating mobile operators. Alternatively we could pay commercial rates and do it ourselves.

A lot of effort is invested in making Wikipedia, MediaWiki perform better. This is another obvious improvement that will make a big difference not only to our Wikipedia Zero users but for everyone who uses our projects outside of the USA and much of Europe.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Democracy in #Myanmar

Because of the economic boycott of Myanmar, investments in the technology of Internet that benefit the people from Myanmar and the people who speak Myanmar did not happen. The technology that enabled the recent Arabian revolutions passed as a consequence Myanmar by.

The Myanmar government does learn from what happens in this world, it did acquire the technology to frustrate the use of the Internet in Myanmar and from Myanmar to the world.

The lack of development for the Myanmar language does not hurt only people in Myanmar, the language is spoken outside Myanmar and the Myanmar script is used for other languages. The argument that it is because of a boycott of the country of Myanmar is misplaced. Not only does it prevent people from taking part of the Internet, it also prevents them from using the Internet to the fullest.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia monitors with #WatchMouse

When a website goes down, you can no longer inform about the status of your website. When you have as many websites and services as the Wikimedia Foundation and when you have a public spread out all over the world you want to provide and have great information about performance.

WatchMouse offers a network of monitors located all over the world who monitor the availability of services. At status.wikimedia.org it provides an external place where everyone can check on the availability of Wikimedia services.

Seeing the first iteration of this service is wonderful. As it is, it provides great information on the technical infrastructure. What most users will be interested in is in learning the status of their project. This will need some careful thought because checking it for more then 800 projects is easier then presenting it nicely.

Having this ready while we are waiting for the installation of release 1.17 is absolutely wonderful.
Thanks,
      GerardM