Wikimedia in Go Daddy boycott, and why you should 'Join the Swarm'

Wikimedia's domain names (including wikipedia.org) will no longer be managed by U.S.-based registrar Go Daddy, it was decided this week following concerns over the registrar's political activities.

The process that led to the decision to ditch the company that has managed Wikimedia's domains since at least 2007 seems to have begun with a December 23 post on the social news website reddit. The post, which has since received 35,000 votes and hundreds of responses, was a simple request directed at Jimmy Wales to "transfer Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy to show you're serious about opposing SOPA". It refers to the registrar's then open support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to which many Wikimedians and redditors are emphatically opposed. Many reddit commenters pledged donations if Wales committed to moving Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy, part of a wider reddit campaign to get organisations to leave Go Daddy.

The response to the post was swift. The same day as the post, Wales committed to a move away from Go Daddy on his Twitter page, although an orderly transition is likely to take some time. (Wales also announced the transfer of Wikia domains as part of the same process.) A twist came shortly after the announcement, when Go Daddy issued a press release stating that it was withdrawing its support for SOPA. The statement, a world away from their earlier description of their opposition to SOPA as "myopic", does not seem to have yet prompted any change of action by Wales or the Foundation.

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• How you can help: Join the Swarm: As reported on the wikitech-l mailing list, the WMF "TestSwarm" interface is back up and running on integration.mediawiki.org. The interface allows users to contribute to all important JavaScript testing of MediaWiki simply by specifying a username and pressing a button. The browser window, left open, will then check at 30-second intervals whether there are any tests it can run.
• MediaWiki core group explored: Director of Platform Engineering Robert Lanphier used a post on the Wikimedia blog to highlight the "core" grouping within the WMF platform engineering team. Lanphier writes how the group "is responsible for our sites' stability, security, performance and architectural cleanliness. This ends up translating into a lot of code review, along with infrastructure projects like disk-backed object cache, heterogeneous deployment, continuous integration, and performance-related work." The group is also notable for the fact that its members all started as volunteers, and has an open position (Software Security Engineer); Lanphier appealed for applications from interested developers.
• 84 hours of pageview statistics missing: Approximately 3.5 days' worth of page view statistics, covering the period 23 December to 26 December, appear to have been lost after a change that contained an error was made to the code responsible for their creation in the early hours of 23 December (UTC). The alarm was raised on the English Wikipedia technical village pump; unfortunately, it seems likely that stats.grok.se and other page view counters will continue to report reduced viewer figures for 23 and 26 December, and zero counts for 24 and 25 December.
• LocalisationUpdates resume: On a more positive note, the WMF installation of the LocalisationUpdate extension has now been fixed. The extension, which copies across up-to-date translations daily from translatewiki.net, had been experiencing problems since early November.
• WMF features office hours: The WMF features team, which drives big projects such as the Visual Editor, will hold an "office hours" RC talk on 4 January, Community Organizer Steven Walling clarified this week (foundation-l mailing list).
• Module experts acknowledged?: A discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list pointed to the definition and use of developer specialisations. The system would label developers (either paid or volunteer) as being the standard first point of call in an area, and there would be the potential for reviewing tie-ins, similar to how Mozilla developers handle patch review. The suggestion is one of many made in recent months to combat the problem of lengthy code review times.
• Internal programming languages: The issue of the provision of a safe programming language to template coders was once again discussed this week (wikitech-l mailing list). The often mooted topic centres around what an ideal "template language" would look like, so it could be safe, to allow new templates to be created, and to simplify the coding of existing templates.

← Previous "Technology report"

In this issue

26 December 2011 (all comments)

Opinion essay

Recent research

News and notes

WikiProject report

Featured content

Arbitration report

Technology report

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

• Domain names Hm. I am not sure that I agree with this sort of action. It is, of course, important that the WMF, the communities and individuals make their position known about such matters as SOPA, but this type of "secondary action" does not in general make for a harmonious society, and is dangerously close to ultra vires, at least in spirit. Rich Farmbrough, 17:04, 28 December 2011 (UTC).[reply]
  
  • While the category of action is certainly dubious, this particular action seems justified, especially given that choice of registrar is largely arbitrary. I think it's worthwhile to explore the validity of individual actions from otherwise dubious categories. (It's curious, now that I think of it, to more broadly note that Wikipedians seem to prefer consequentialism to more deontological views.) {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 20:16, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm confused. ultra vires = Outside of one's authority (based on the article i just read). I can't think of an issue that is more at the core of the foundations responsibilities/authority than issues related to servers, hosting etc - of which I would consider to include choice of domain registrar. Bawolff (talk) 08:07, 30 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• "Go Daddy issued a press release describing how it was withdrawing its support for SOPA" is a bit disingenuous, in that Go Daddy's language in their "withdrawal" implies that they will once again support some form of SOPA, once the furor dies down. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:28, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not sure I agree with "disingenuous". IMHO the implication is not clear at all; I'd rather leave the reader to decide. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 19:54, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Internal programming languages We are now in the crazy situation where there are a number of solutions that are available more or less at the click of a button - and the existing situation kills rendering times, breaks pages and so forth, yet no one can actually implement any of the solutions. Oh well, off to join another mailing list. Rich Farmbrough, 17:10, 28 December 2011 (UTC).[reply]
  • Yeah, I guess everyone desperately doesn't want to get it wrong. The status quo is at least secure. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 19:54, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]