Technology report
What does it take to upload a file?
The 2020 Picture of the Year was uploaded using the Commons UploadWizard.
- Legoktm is a site reliability engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation. He wrote this in his volunteer capacity.
There is some irony in a piece of software being named MediaWiki while it struggles with media files, but it's not that surprising given that much of Wikipedia's focus and efforts go towards developing text. On the Main Page, you'll most likely have to scroll past multiple sections celebrating written text until you hit the day's featured photo.
Given the recent issues with uploading files, let's take a look into what it actually takes to upload a file to Wikimedia servers.