Re: mirrors.wikimedia.org will be sunset on May 15

Also, personally, I feel a bit burnt out by the tone and wording of the
last part of this message "Since it is no longer needed by us, (and y'all
don't matter) we will use the money somewhere else" in the context of the
recent "rug pull" (for the lack of a better term) of multiple public and
open services being removed as part of a fight against scrapers (to mention
a few: media reuse, Etherpad, API rate limits on normal APIs, and now
mirrors?).

These are services that well-meaning open-source contributors used to take
away and share with others, as "hey, this is something that you can depend
on cause it is managed by Wikimedia." I've personally recommended Etherpad
and mirrors to individuals in my friend circle as stable endpoints that they
can use. I've seen people out of the blue recommend Etherpad and have found
them to be former contributors to the movement or former WMF staff members.
Removing/lobotomizing/signaling that these services are not durable and
there is no intention of properly maintaining them burns goodwill with the
open-source community at large and makes it very hard for folks to recommend
"hey, use this service that Wikimedia provides," because you are not sure
if it will be sunset again.

Regards,
Sohom Datta
---
Open-source contributor @Wikimedia


On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 10:51 AM Sohom Datta <[email protected]> wrote:

> All MediaWiki-Docker instances are configured to use mirrors.wikimedia.org.
> Breaking this would potentially break all of CI and the setups of
> effectively a large majority of those who develop software for MediaWiki.
>
> Regards,
> Sohom Datta
> ---
> Open-source contributor @Wikimedia
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 9:04 AM Moritz Mühlenhoff via Wikitech-l <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> What happens
>>
>> mirrors.wikimedia.org will be sunset on May 15.
>>
>> What do I need to do?
>>
>> Probably nothing. This is not a widely used service. If you use the
>> service via the Debian mirror rotation one of the many other servers
>> will take over. If you have actively configured mirrors.wikimedia.org
>> in your APT configuration on Debian/Ubuntu (desktop, virtual machine
>> or server) you need to switch to a different server. This shouldn’t
>> take more than a minute.
>> You can find alternatives on https://www.debian.org/mirror/list and
>> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+cdmirrors. If you use Windows or Mac you
>> will not be affected.
>>
>>
>> Why
>>
>> The usefulness of this service has diminished over time. Since the
>> initial creation Debian has built a CDN (deb.debian.org) to provide
>> Debian packages and most systems use it today for more fine-grained
>> geographical access and overall better resiliency.
>>
>> The service is not behind the Wikimedia CDN which provides all the
>> countermeasures to aggressive scraping. Sometimes AI scrapers degrade
>> the service temporarily and moving it behind the CDN would involve
>> substantial engineering efforts. The hardware running the mirror
>> server is at its estimated lifetime and would need to be replaced.
>>
>> Since it is no longer needed the way it was when it was created, we
>> can be of more use to the Wikimedia movement by spending these
>> resources elsewhere.
>>
>>
>> Where can I follow the process?
>>
>> This Phabricator ticket:
>> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T416707
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Moritz
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected]
>> To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
>>
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
>
>

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/