24 TB for User:Dispenser on Tool Labs please

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James Salsman

3 Jul 2014 3 Jul '14

7:12 a.m.

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs? To me this just shouts "some of our people are not yet in the top quintile of their fields." Seriously. If you don't want to have to wait for REST transactions, it seems like a completely reasonable amount of cache to me. I have yet to read a comment about the magnitude with any indication that people have any idea what kind of caching is needed across Cartesian products of even a five dimensional reduction of category tree proximity. On a related note, why does WP:BACKLOG still not have conflicts of interest back on it? Was all of that Terms of Service amendment only for show? Can the Foundation please hire an information theoretician familiar with the hyperbolic space embedding of splay trees? Best regards, James Salsman

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Strainu

3 Jul 3 Jul

7:14 a.m.

2014-07-03 14:12 GMT+03:00 James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

Context please? Strainu

Michael Peel

7:50 a.m.

On 3 Jul 2014, at 12:14, Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

2014-07-03 14:12 GMT+03:00 James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>om>:

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

Context please?

There's been a discussion of this topic going on at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Suggest… Thanks, Mike

John

7:52 a.m.

Im mobile right now, do this will be short. He is throwing a tantrum because WMF won't give him 24TB of storage for a project that has legal questionablity. So he is using his existing tools as leverage aka hostages to force the issue. I find that very bad behavior on his part On Thursday, July 3, 2014, Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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2014-07-03 14:12 GMT+03:00 James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com <javascript:;>>:

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

Context please? Strainu _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org <javascript:;> ?subject=unsubscribe>

Marc A. Pelletier

1:49 p.m.

On 07/03/2014 07:12 AM, James Salsman wrote:

...

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

To make matters a bit clearer, Dispenser's current Reflinks tool (and all his others) do not need 24T of storage (nor would toolserver have had that storage to give him, even if it were possible). His demands for the storage are for a new version of the tool he is yet to write that is meant to actually cache the external link's webpages - a request he has yet to actually make to WMF Engineering. He was never told no; he was told (by me, inter alia) that he'd need to make a proposal with explanation and rationale before we would commit several thousand dollars of resources towards an unspecified, future project of his (especially one that is likely to need Legal to look into). That he has not in fact moved his existing tools to Tool Labs is unrelated to this; there is no technical impediment to him running his tools in Labs today if he chooses to. Also, 24T is a significant chunk of the space available to Labs in general; storage is nowhere near as inexpensive in our context as would be with off-the-shelf customer-grade disks. There's nothing that prevents us from allocating significant resources to a project that needs it (to wit: open street maps tile generator) but we're not going to do that site unseen and without supervision. -- Marc

Gregory Varnum

2:16 p.m.

That all seems logical, appropriate, and aligned with our current procedures. So..what's the problem? -greg aka varnent On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:

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On 07/03/2014 07:12 AM, James Salsman wrote:

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

John

2:21 p.m.

I'm in the process of working with Dispenser to get said proposal written and the ball rolling. However this process will take some time On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum <gregory.varnum(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

That all seems logical, appropriate, and aligned with our current procedures. So..what's the problem? -greg aka varnent On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:

On 07/03/2014 07:12 AM, James Salsman wrote:

Can someone please explain to me why the Foundation can't give User:Dispenser 24 TB on Tool Labs?

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Marc A. Pelletier

4 Jul 4 Jul

1:04 p.m.

On 07/03/2014 02:21 PM, John wrote:

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I'm in the process of working with Dispenser to get said proposal written and the ball rolling. However this process will take some time

Said proposal from Dispenser/Betacommand has been posted at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Caching_References for comments and discussion. -- Marc

Fæ

3 Jul 3 Jul

6:58 p.m.

On 3 July 2014 19:16, Gregory Varnum <gregory.varnum(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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That all seems logical, appropriate, and aligned with our current procedures. So..what's the problem?

Left hand not talking to the right hand I think. I was gobsmacked to find that the reflinks tool had not been carefully transitioned and no plan for it was in place, considering how much time was available to discuss this. It is one of the more brilliant tools for productive Wikipedians. I used to use it all the time and without it will happily leave bare URLs in references as these used to be handled rather well without wasting my volunteer time hacking around filling in parameters of the template and my assumption is that one way, or another, this sort of service will become available again. The ball was definitely dropped on this one. The way forward is clearly to identify the requirements for the specific tools. Hosting on WMFlabs can have any rules that the WMF thinks are sensible, but this is not the only way of hosting a tool if the policies don't fit, especially if the intention is to get something back up and working in an interim state, while people debate its future in the background. The concepts are not that complex that volunteers or paid developers could not put together an open source alternative fairly quickly, given sufficient motivation. A discussion that could have been had a year ago with the user community. Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

Pete Forsyth

7:03 p.m.

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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I was gobsmacked to find that the reflinks tool had not been carefully transitioned and no plan for it was in place,

Me too, to the extent I'm gobsmacked by anything these days. My students love this tool, it's one of the primary things that help make the crucial transition from "I'm a newbie" to "I can take care of my own needs as a writer on Wikipedia."

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The way forward is clearly to identify the requirements for the specific tools. Hosting on WMFlabs can have any rules

It seemed to me that one of the legacy problems that was supposed to be addressed by the transition from toolserver to WMFlabs was to ensure that source code is freely licensed and available. So this leads me to a question, maybe others in this discussion know the answer, but I don't: Is Reftools FOSS? Is the source code available? If so, why isn't somebody else just migrating it to WMFlabs, and what can be done to help that happen? And if not, maybe we'd be better off if we found a way to build a replacement tool under a FOSS license? -Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

Douglas Gardner

7:23 p.m.

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Is Reftools FOSS? Is the source code available? If so, why isn't somebody else just migrating it to WMFlabs, and what can be done to help that

happen? I may be missing something, but Dispenser's tools appear to be migrated at: http://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser/view/Main_Page -- Douglas [[User:Microchip08]]

Marc A. Pelletier

7:30 p.m.

On 07/03/2014 07:03 PM, Pete Forsyth wrote:

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Is Reftools FOSS? Is the source code available? If so, why isn't somebody else just migrating it to WMFlabs, and what can be done to help that happen?

No, it is not, and Dispenser has explicitly stated that nobody was allowed to run it. In particular, someone already /had/ moved it (I am told about 30m of work) but Dispenser requested it disabled. -- Marc

Pete Forsyth

10:43 p.m.

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:

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On 07/03/2014 07:03 PM, Pete Forsyth wrote:

Is Reftools FOSS?

No, it is not,

Thanks Marc. It seems to me that the problem is very simple, in that case: how to come up with a free/libre tool, to be hosted on WMFlabs, that replicates the functionality of the previously-existing RefTools? I'm willing to donate a little money and help spread the word. If there's a developer capable of doing that, who could estimate how much it would cost, please get in touch with me. I could also offer some help in putting together a WMF grant proposal if that's a preferred avenue. Let's leave all these questions about *additional* functionality aside, and take care of the clear current problem. And please, let's not devote too much of our limited bandwidth to non-free software. Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]

Samuel Klein

11:49 p.m.

John: thank you again. James Salsman writes:

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suggestions that IA has any more legal risk than the Foundation

Of course they do. The Wayback Machine alone is the largest publicly-accessible archive of copyrighted material in the world. The only other archives that come within magnitudes of that effort are state-sponsored and -protected, such as Norway's Nasjonalbiblioteket. Pete Forsyth wrote:

...

Is Reftools FOSS?

No, it is not,

It seems to me that the problem is very simple, in that case: how to come up with a free/libre tool, to be hosted on WMFlabs

Last I checked, Labs requires OSI-approved licenses. I believe the context is that Dispenser (the developer) would adopt such a license. Sam

Andrew Gray

6:56 p.m.

New subject: [Spam] Re: 24 TB for User:Dispenser on Tool Labs please

On 3 July 2014 18:49, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:

...

Also, 24T is a significant chunk of the space available to Labs in general; storage is nowhere near as inexpensive in our context as would be with off-the-shelf customer-grade disks. There's nothing that prevents us from allocating significant resources to a project that needs it (to wit: open street maps tile generator) but we're not going to do that site unseen and without supervision.

As an aside to this: even were you to do it with crappy consumer-grade disks, you're still looking at the better part of a thousand dollars - the cheapest price for a new off-the-shelf disk looks to be about $35/tb, so perhaps eight hundred dollars or more. Presumably even for crappy disks the costs of putting them in a box and plugging it in are still there, too - call it a round thousand for the cheapest option. I haven't been following this case, but I would think saying "let's figure out what you want to do before we spend a thousand dollars on it" would be an eminently reasonable position for Marc to take. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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participants (11)

Andrew Gray
Douglas Gardner
Fæ
Gregory Varnum
James Salsman
John
Marc A. Pelletier
Michael Peel
Pete Forsyth
Samuel Klein
Strainu