While I find Wikipedia about as trustworthy as any random stranger at a pub, I can't deny that Wikipedia is incredibly popular. According to the Web traffic monitoring site Alexa on an average day 8.5% of the world's Internet users will visit the site. That's a lot of hits. Now, to manage this incredible load of approximately two-million unique visitors a day, Wikipedia is moving from a hodge-podge of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora servers to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Service).
This switch-over from Red Hat to Ubuntu has been taking place over a period of several years. According to Brion Vibber, CTO of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia made the move because the "mix of things, some Red Hat 9, some Fedora, several different versions," made it harder and harder for Wikipedia's tiny five-person IT staff to maintain Wikipedia's approximately 400 servers.
