Luis VillaThe best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016.
The second-best time is today.
(Might even be the first-best time now, since funding for sovereignty is more plentiful and there are more potential technical partnerships.)
David Gerard@luis_in_brief god, the cost of WMF-level infra. has anyone got an estimate of what it would cost to stand up and run? @bvibber do you have numbers you are able to say?
Brooke Vibber 
@davidgerard @luis_in_brief i do not have numbers offhand, but wmf annual budget is a strict upper bound ;)
Derk-Jan 💙💛🇺🇦@bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief my back of the envelope guess would be about 3 million a year for an org to run a reliable dark archive and 8 million a year to actually start running something that you could visit (not edit). and those numbers assume the foundation is still doing its job next to what the eu side would be doing and assumes a redundant, non-US, sovereign cloud or self hosted solution.
Only gets more expensive after that.
Only gets more expensive after that.
Woozle Hypertwin@TheDJ @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief
I'd say the primary goal should be a read-only mirror. Once you've got that, you've got defense against WP going dark, becoming inaccessible, or having stuff deleted by political edict -- and can move forward with additional pieces (editability, development...) once any significant shoes drop.
You wouldn't need an org anything like the size of MediaWiki just for that. At a glance, I'd say it's within reach of a modestly wealthy individual or a small org.
Becca@woozle @TheDJ @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief Kiwix and zim archives
Becca (@[email protected])
wikipedia, get yours here https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ #wikipedia #kiwix #zim
@bweller @woozle @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief those are not mirrors, they are lossy copies. They work because they make subselections of what to preserve. Leave out that which most people never see, never hear. Lossy compression, like jpegs, mp3 or AI models.
@bweller @woozle @bvibber @davidgerard @luis_in_brief important. But not the same. They exist to help people in ‘no internet’-situations. Not to continue the process of making Wikipedia in case of emergency.