en.wiki domain owned by us, but isn't hosted by us??
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	Bawolff
	Jun 5 2017, 7:53 PM

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What's up with the domain en.wiki. According to whois, we own it:

$ whois en.wiki
Domain Name: EN.WIKI
Registry Domain ID: D7097392-CNIC
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.porkbun.com
Registrar URL:
Updated Date: 2017-05-10T09:13:15.0Z
Creation Date: 2015-03-03T18:01:25.0Z
[..]
Registry Registrant ID: C16495171-CNIC
Registrant Name: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Registrant Organization: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Registrant Street: 149 New Montgomery Street

But it's A record points to 54.148.61.160 (ec2-54-148-61-160.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com), and it appears to be a (no https) webserver that redirects to www.wikipedia.org but only if the url has no path.

This seems super odd. Why don't we just fully host this domain?

Related Objects

Mentioned Here: T88873: register .wiki gTLD domains
T145907: Use .wiki domains instead of .org on wiki sites owned by wikimedia foundation

Event Timeline

Bawolff created this task.Jun 5 2017, 7:53 PM

Restricted Application added a project: Traffic. · View Herald TranscriptJun 5 2017, 7:53 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

• ema moved this task from Backlog to Domain name registration on the Traffic board.Jun 14 2017, 4:11 PM

Restricted Application added a project: SRE. · View Herald TranscriptJun 14 2017, 4:11 PM

Check this for ALL of the other language prefixes too. We once had them all, was a long discussion with the owner of .wiki years ago. Then WMF decided to not use them. (except w.wiki). Raymond was sad about it after all the discussion. Then i don't know what happened.

de.wiki, fr.wiki, it.wiki, etc etc...

T145907 and T88873

Hmm. W.wiki seems to be similar in that we own the domain but the A record points to AWS. It has the additional interesting thing in that its included in the subject alt name of our main certificate

Oh, i see, the A record points to a page which is hosted by the registrar for .wiki (who happens to use aws- i didnt originally think of navigating to 54.148.61.160 to find out more info...), so its essential some domain parking service that redirects to our site.

So at least thats a little less sketch than it being some totally random aws account. Still would be nicer to cut out the third party.

• Marostegui triaged this task as Low priority.Jun 19 2017, 8:44 AM

wikibooks.wiki too - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Domain_parking

Resetting priority for re-triage by ops on-call.

Redirecting users though a random AWS account when they hit a domain we own, even if its low usage seems to be a possible privacy issue.

There's a lot else to be said about the subject of the .wiki TLD (much of which has been said before on past tickets), and I tend to agree it's confusing that they're registered to our name but not our nameservers (but if they were on our nameservers, we'd currently be sending them to the black hole).

The bottom line is that, with the exception of w.wiki, none of the subdomains of .wiki are canonical content domains of ours. We don't advertise them or publish links to them, and users shouldn't expect them to host our content.

The current canonical domain list is at: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/HTTPS#For_the_Foundation's_canonical_domainnames

TerraCodes subscribed.Jan 16 2018, 1:54 AM

Somebody can login at Porkbun and change the DNS settings of these domains (EXCEPT w.wiki !) and blackhole them. Also just now we got emails about renewals for those coming up. So the question might be if we should keep holding them. That being said these things are not done by Ops in this case. Somebody in Legal/Office handles the domain buying and should have Porkbun access to do it.

• MZMcBride subscribed.Jan 24 2018, 12:37 AM

I've changed the domains we have with Porkbun to use our nameservers. (I didn't change anything about w.wiki.) It might take a little while for them all to update.

Dzahn awarded a token.Feb 1 2018, 11:25 PM

sbassett moved this task from Intake to Done on the Privacy board.Oct 16 2019, 5:33 PM

sbassett triaged this task as Medium priority.Oct 16 2019, 5:40 PM

en.wiki domain owned by us, but isn't hosted by us??Closed, ResolvedPublicActions

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en.wiki domain owned by us, but isn't hosted by us??
Closed, ResolvedPublic
Actions