Wikimini
Wikimini (Wikimini FR, Wikimini SV and more!) is an online encyclopedia, founded in 2008 by the Wikimini community, and written by children and teenagers helped by adults.
Please note: Wikimini is an independent project, and Wikimedia CH does not manage Wikimini content since it's just the service provider (since 2021).
About
You can find further information about Wikimini itself on Wikipedia:
Wikimini Numbers
Here a showcase with some interesting numbers about Wikimini valid in February 2021.[1]
26,000
Wikiminini has an average of 26,000 visits, each day.
15,636
The French edition of Wikimini has 15,636 articles created by their community.
13,591
Wikimini has 13,591 uploaded multimedia files saved in their Stock wiki.
26
Wikimini has 26 administrators.
Wikimini Stats
Here a gallery with some numbers made by the Wikimini project.
These stats were collected thanks to Matomo, a Free software web-analytic platform, GDPR-friendly, available to Wikimedia CH.
Wikimini visits in period January-February 2021.
Wikimini visits by local time in February 2021.
Wikimini visits by week day in February 2021.
Technology
wmch-demo owned by Wikimedia CH.Technically, Wikimini is a wiki farm (a single MediaWiki installation serving multiple instances) consisting in 3 active wikis, and 8 overall wikis.
Wikimini has a unique highly-customized MediaWiki skin. As such, Wikimini is shown in the page mw:Sites using MediaWiki/gallery.
The most active Wikimini's wikis are:
- French edition
- Swedish edition
- Wikimini Stock - shared image repository (like Wikimedia Commons)
The wikis are also registered and monitored by the WikiApiary project, which is a project monitoring big wiki farms like the one of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimini previously had a very powerful but expensive server. In an effort to reduce the production costs of the server, in 2021 Wikimedia CH offered its technical infrastructure to Wikimini founders. The WMCH infrastructure is made of scalable virtual servers able keep the project online fitting the requirements, paying only the necessary hardware resources (in terms of CPU, RAM, bandwidth, disk space).
Wikimedia CH started planning the migration since November 2020, fixing the migration itself for February 2021, with the plan to decommission the legacy servers on March 1st 2021. The migration was completed and the servers have been decommissioned effectively reducing hosting costs for 2021 and later.
Before the migration we created a script to automatize the copy of all the filesystem files, wiki images and all the databases and legacy SSL certificates, in order to do weekly intermediate test migrations and reduce the possibility of human errors.
One of the problems that was encountered was the understimation of the incoming traffic together with the inability of the old version of MediaWiki to serve that traffic on our new server without a proper cache. Just after the migration, even with a proper cache system, we had to scale up the virtual machine finally reaching a situation of stability at minimum hardware resources.
Another thing that was encountered during the migration, was the incredible clogging of the server's log files with MediaWiki warnings. This caused the disks to clog very quickly even with an adequate rotation policy. We fixed patching MediaWiki 1.28.0 to fit the new practices required by PHP7.
The MediaWiki application was patched and not updated, in order to being able to adopt the PHP7 branch, which was the current stable version of PHP. This made it possible to migrate in days instead of months. Note that one of the three wikis has nearly 35 enabled extensions, which is an interesting amount of software to keep maintained and updated.
We plan to migrate MediaWiki to the latest version to take advantage of the latest features and to have integrated VisualEditor, instead of a dedicated NodeJS server running the legacy Parsoid/JS service.
The SSL certificates were renewed thanks to the Let's Encrypt technology, for all the sub-domains. This has no cost for future years.
Wikimini has some cute features like the ability to show the image of the day, which retrieves the image from Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia CH tried to take care all these features, but we succeeded only thanks to the huge participation of the Wikimini's original technical contributors. Especially Laurent Jauquier, which helped Wikimedia CH overcome every migration issue.
Wikimedia CH released additional technical details in Wikimedia Phabricator for maximum transparency, as for the interventions carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Migration details in Wikimedia Phabricator
Contact
Have you noticed any technical problem in Wikimini who needs quick professional support? Do you have any idea that needs any development? Check if there is something similar scheduled, or request an intervention from here:
Thank you for your help!
Note
- ↑ Farm:Wikimini card on WikiApiary
See also
- (English) Wikimini/Technical documentation