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TheWikimedia Toolserver[1] was a cluster of servers that ran all the Wikipedia Toolserver tools; it was operated byWikimedia Deutschland e. V.[2]
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Wikimedia Toolserver was fairly accessible over the Internet, and served out many useful tools written for the Wikimedia projects. The Wikipedia Toolserver provided access to a database of all Wikimedia's projects. Interested programmers could get a shell account to update and care for their scripts.
The Toolserver started operations in 2005 afterWikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) received servers donated by Sun Microsystems. The Toolserver was funded and operated by WMDE, but also received additional funding from theWikimedia Foundation (WMF),Wikimedia UK (WMUK) and others.
The servers hosted software-based tools written by volunteers of the WMF projects. The majority of the tools performed maintenance on WMF projects and allow their smooth operation. Anybody couldrequest an account on the Toolserver to provide tools that help WMF based projects.
The Toolserver occasionally had glitches that affected its operation and sometimes caused downtime of the system. There were several places to find the status of the Toolserver's operations.
Contact information could be found attswiki:Contact and atmeta:Toolserver#Contact.
Because of the importance of toolserver tools and the difficulty in maintaining the toolserver infrastructure, it was decided that a move to a larger organization would be good, decommissioning the current toolserver. WMDE has committed to funding and maintaining the toolserver until all users have had a sufficient chance to move to the new system. (see alsoWMDE comments at VPT)
Wikimedia Labs (a.k.a. Tool Labs, WMFLabs, etc.) was the Wikimedia Foundation's replacement for the Toolserver and was located atwikitech:Main Page. It was intended to handle most of the tools set up on the toolserver, but requires the tool authors to release their codeunder a free license. It was also available forrunning bots.
In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contractedMarc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been setup atwikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found atmw:Wikimedia Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.
Though some users migrated their tools to WMFLabs early, the full-scale migration process began in June 2013 and expected to be complete by December 2013 with everything completed by June 2014 when items on the toolserver will be deleted. Final decommissioning of the toolserver was tentatively scheduled to be complete by December 2014.
The infrastructure for Tool Labs was still in the process of being set up with database replication the last major issue. Status updates may be found atwikitech:Tool Labs/Database plan and also atmw:Wikimedia Labs/Tool Labs/TODO.
On July 1, 2014, the Toolserver was shut down. Some users set up redirects to tool labs, which continue to function.
Jira was the issue tracker for Toolserver and provides database reports for WMF projects.
As the Toolserver constantly replicated the databases that hold details about Wikipedia and the pages between them,Wikipedians with access to the toolserver were ideally placed to query the server and derive customisedreports for other Wikipedians on request. The relationships easiest to query were between:
Please add any projects here