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Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on servers. Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the distribution’s visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its viability in large-scale deployments.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is primarily funded by donations, the organization’s technical requirements are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.

In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into some of Wikimedia’s technical challenges and discussed the benefit of migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.

He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200 servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has simplified administration considerably for the organization. “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing,” Vibber told Computerworld. “Everything is a million times easier.”

Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in 2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced Landscape, a server management tool.

Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.

Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution’s growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn’t appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large-scale free deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for support contracts.

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Google develops Wikipedia rival

Search and advertising giant Google is developing a user-generated online encyclopaedia that could rival Wikipedia.

Google has named the scheme the “knol project”, a knol being a “unit of knowledge”, according to a blog post by Google engineering vice president Udi Manber. The company aims to tie strong identities to contributing authors and those seeking to edit knols.

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” wrote Manber. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

Google will host and provide tools to produce and edit knol web pages, but will not edit or advocate any of the content. However, entries that Google judges to be of higher quality will be given a higher page ranking in Google search.

Entries will be rated by the community and will be able to be reviewed after the unspecified testing period. The project is currently in beta and has been sent to a small group of testers. Once the knol tool goes live, contributors will be able to monetise their pages by including Google ads.

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Wikipedia wins landmark privacy lawsuit in France

A French court has ruled that Wikipedia could not be held responsible for content posted by its users in a landmark ruling for the Internet giant, officials said Friday.

Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros (100,000 dollars) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website, which is written and edited by thousands of anonymous contributors.

But a judge rejected their demands in a ruling reached on Monday, arguing that “the Wikimedia Foundation’s responsibility … has not been clearly established,” a decision welcomed by the foundation.

“The decision is very clear and we appreciate the fact the court acknowledges our role as an Internet host, rather than an editor,” said Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation’s board.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is an “open-source” Internet encyclopedia, which is to say anyone with access to a computer can edit it. The Foundation’s task is to work out ground rules and editorial policy and raise funds to pay for IT investments and development projects.

Devouard said the contested information was added anonymously to a Wikipedia article before being “quickly withdrawn, even if it remained accessible for a while through the site’s records.”

One of the plaintiffs “sent an e-mail which we never received before turning to his lawyer,” she said.

“When we are informed of this type of mistake we always try to react in the following hours to withdraw such information,” said Devouard, who is based near the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

With eight million articles and counting, in 250 languages from English and Arabic to Tagalog or Wolof, Wikipedia says it is used each month by more than 100 million people.

Although its accuracy is reportedly on a par with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia has also faced a mounting battle against misinformation and information vandalism.

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