Miraheze

Miraheze
wiki hosting service
URL	https://miraheze.org
Status	Online!
Archiving status	Saved by itself (all public wikis dumped monthly on archive.org)
Archiving type	other
IRC channel	#wikiteam (on hackint)
Data[how to use]	@miraheze (self-dumps) wikifarm-miraheze.org-20160930 (2016) wikifarm-miraheze.org-20170402 (2017)

Miraheze is a non-profit MediaWiki wikifarm which was set up in August 2015, operated by the WikiTide Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity in the United States. As of November 2024, they host over 11,000 wikis (including private ones). Its GitHub organisation can be found here; its Phorge issue tracker instance can be found here.

Pursuant to their Dormancy Policy, Miraheze regularly deletes wikis that have not been edited in over a year unless wikis are granted an exemption. Inactive wikis are backed up by Miraheze before deletion and are restored on request.

History

Miraheze was founded in August 2015 by John F. Lewis and Ferran Tufan, two former Orain volunteers. It was named after two Wikimedia servers (John worked at Wikimedia at the time) named after stars, "mira" and "heze". Shortly after launch, Orain fell victim to a cyberattack which permanantly brought it down with most major Orain wikis migrating to Miraheze thus establishing it as its de facto successor.

Miraheze reached 5,000 wikis in 2021 but began growing too fast which led to server strain and eventually to the failure of a database disk which brought down 1/4 of the farm for a week and a half in November 2022.

In June 2023, following discontent with leadership and a dispute over the global ban of a former Steward, core Miraheze volunteers split from Miraheze and formed WikiTide, wiping out over 3/4 of Miraheze's volunteer base and leaving Miraheze unable to sustain itself. This triggered a shutdown crisis which was averted a few days later when some former and inactive volunteers attempted to take over operations. They were unable to and the much more successful WikiTide eventually acquired Miraheze in January 2024 thus bringing the schism to an end when WikiTide was remerged in to Miraheze.

Overview

Miraheze is operated by the WikiTide Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity in the United States. It was acquired by WikiTide in early 2024 and the Foundation's flagship WikiTide service was merged into Miraheze.

Miraheze operates on a modest budget funded entirely by donations. They operate their entire data center in-house with colocation services provided by Fiberstate in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.

As of November 2024, their whole cluster sits on approximately 320 CPU cores, 1.1 TB RAM and ~17 TB of disk space. They currently operate 67 servers for different uses and serve over a 20 billion requests per year.

The wikifarm hosts All The Tropes, Rosetta Code (Wikipedia article), along with various other big wikis.

Backups

Miraheze backs up all their public wikis monthly and publishes an XML and image dump of all of them on archive.org. Miraheze also makes their own backups of their services regularly to an offsite server. In April 2019, Miraheze created the DataDump extension and deployed it on all its wikis, allowing wiki operators to generate and download dumps through the "Special:DataDump" page. By default, only admins possess the "view-dump", "delete-dump", and "generate-dump" rights, but wiki operators can extend these rights to other users through "Special:ManageWiki/permissions" if they so desire.

WikiTeam also managed to grab about 685 public wikis hosted on its cluster in September 2016 and in April 2017.

In the midst of the June 2023 shutdown crisis, new XML exports and image dumps were performed by WikiTeam. Following the WikiTide merger, XML and image dumps began to be generated every month.

A public list of all wikis is available.

See also

• WikiTeam#Wikifarms
• Orain
• WikiTide and WikiForge

External links

• https://meta.miraheze.org/^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]}