The Wikimedia Foundation and Yahoo! announced on April 7, 2005 that they had reached an agreement by which Yahoo will provide hosting capacity to Wikimedia. Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites. Jimmy Wales, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that this generous donation will be of particular benefit to the vibrant and growing community of Wikipedia users in that part of the world.

Yahoo!'s donation is a gesture of support for the charitable goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and does not imply any ownership of the content. Yahoo! does not expect Wikimedia to host advertisements in return for this support.

Server details edit

Jimmy Wales posted the following server details to the mailing list on June 26, 2005. The plan is to set these up with some Linux image, probably RHEL4. These machines will have boot boxes and serial consoles.

  • 3x DL385, dual CPU, 8GB RAM and 6 x 146GB 15k RAID 10.
    • These have capacity for external shelves, can be added if needed.
  • 20x DL140, dual CPU, 4GB RAM and 1 x 80GB HDD

These machines entered in service on September 15 2005 [1]

Shortcuts edit

Yahoo! also began testing the integration of Wikipedia content in its French-language Yahoo! Search shortcuts on April 7, 2005. This was expected to be followed by other languages to accommodate users in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. The shortcuts will show contextually relevant abstracts of Wikipedia articles in response to user queries.

Yahoo! is one of the Wikimedia Foundation's earliest corporate supporters. The relationship began last year with Yahoo!'s integration of Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, into their Content Acquisition Program.

Disclaimer edit

This page is not an official statement by the Wikimedia Foundation. An official announcement was made at Wikimedia:Press releases/Wikimedia announces Yahoo support on April 7, 2005.