This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.
For the LABS replacement plans of June 2013, see WP:LABS.
The Toolserver was shut down on July 1, 2014. See Future of Toolserver on Meta-Wiki.
The Wikimedia Toolserver[1] was a cluster of servers that ran all the Wikipedia Toolserver tools; it was operated by Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.[2]
Wikimedia Toolserver
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 after Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) received servers donated by Sun Microsystems. The Toolserver was funded and operated by WMDE, but also received additional funding from the Wikimedia 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 could request an account on the Toolserver to provide tools that help WMF based projects.
Operational status
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.
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 also WMDE comments at VPT)
Wikimedia Labs (a.k.a. Tool Labs, WMFLabs, etc.) was the Wikimedia Foundation's replacement for the Toolserver and was located at wikitech:Main Page. It was intended to handle most of the tools set up on the toolserver, but requires the tool authors to release their code under a free license. It was also available for running bots.
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.
On July 1, 2014, the Toolserver was shut down. Some users set up redirects to tool labs, which continue to function.
Projects
Toolserver reports
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 customised reports for other Wikipedians on request. The relationships easiest to query were between:
pages
the categories they are in
the external links they have
the images or other media they link to.
Current Wikipedia projects that relied on the Toolserver
