Streamlined Management
Interview – Wikimedia's Jaime Crespo
Jaime Crespo, from the Wikimedia Foundation, discusses the challenges of managing one of the world's largest collaborative knowledge projects.
At Percona Live Europe 2019, I joked with Jaime Crespo, Senior Database Administrator (DBA) for the Wikimedia Foundation, that the Wikipedia project is essentially just one big database. You might expect that it takes hordes of DBAs to keep one of the world's largest knowledge pools constantly online, but you'd be wrong. Crespo shares the unique challenges Wikimedia faces in managing its servers.
Linux Magazine: Tell me about yourself and how you got started as a database administrator.
Jaime Crespo: My name is Jaime Crespo, and, by my name, it's easy to spot that I'm from Spain. I'm currently the Senior Database Administrator for the Wikimedia Foundation. A bit of follow up to that I have to do is that the Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that provides support, mostly technology, legal and management, to the Wikipedia project and to a lot of other open knowledge projects that we maintain. The actual work is done by everyone, that is, our volunteers. I'm part of the SRE team (Site Reliability Engineering) that helps maintain the servers, so that volunteers and contributors can edit.
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