When I was a kid I read all the encyclopedias in my house. Twice. When I discovered the wikipedia a couple of years ago I was pretty excited about it. Not only because of it’s free content, the fact that anybody can contribute to it, but also because of it’s use of free software.
As of today, the english version of the wikipedia has 807,177 articles. Here I can find info about things I would never see in the Encyclopædia Britannica, like Keyra Agustina, Vampire Watermelons, Fingerskating or the entire plot of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Granted, neither Milton Friedman nor Carl Sagan are Wikipedia colaborators like they were in the Britannica, but it makes a good quick reference anyway.
The wikipedia has seen some explosive growth in the last few years, it has more than 1.8 million articles in more than 100 languages (including my country’s Quechua and aymara).
Everything is powered by Free Software like:
- Linux: Most servers are Fedora Core, but there is also Debian, Redhat and Suse, and a couple of non-linux systems like FreeBSD and Solaris.
- Apache: 76 webservers in a DNS round-robin
- MySQL: 11 mysql servers, the masters using RAID-0
- Mediawiki: The software that powers the wikipedia
- PHP: The language Mediawiki is written in.
- eAccelerator: A PHP accelerator and encoder.
- Squid Web Proxy: 26 Squid Servers working as reverse proxies of the apache servers.
