Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

Wikipedia needs decentralized hosting infra, away from any single country. It is way too important.

Start backing it up now. Partisan influence could be as minor as forcing some edits or as major as pulling their DNS. Every authoritarian in the world follows this same playbook. Over started looking into kiwix.

IA is at risk too.

You can download backups of Wikipedia articles at dumps.wikimedia.org. For the IA they had a plan to move to Canada back in 2017.

Decentralization typically means instead of being subject to one crazy government you are subject to multiple and have to deal with all.

I think wikipedia's approach of centralizing in one place but allowing downloading backups and making all sourcecode and server config public is better. If the worst happens anyone can setup a fork.

The hosting isn’t important, it’s easy to move or have an offline copy already. The access to fundraising is much more important and more complicated.

One of the few truly good sites remaining. I'm afraid decentralization will take away the credibility even further but also would be very sad to see it fall.

Moving to decentralized hosting would be extremely hard without compromising performance, reliability, or the ability to moderate effectively

I didn't immediately consider this, but I think I agree. In a weird way, the access and reach wikipedia has is a lot more valuable from that perspective. And if there is one thing that the US government can do is restrict that in ways that would effectively neuter it.