Toolserver-l March 2009

toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org

17 participants
22 discussions

Next level of stabilization
by Lars Aronsson 03 Mar '09

03 Mar '09

Lately, I've tried to make some large improvements, primarily in the Swedish language Wikipedia. Sometimes this has succeeded, sometimes it has failed or been delayed. Some of the delays have been due to failing server functionality, either at WMF or on the toolserver. We're victims to our own success. Provisional hacks tend to get so successful, that people start to rely on them. I really want to get better geo tagging going in the Swedish Wikipedia. To this end, WikiMiniAtlas was activated some weeks ago. The activation went just fine. But the underlying database is not up to date. This is because Stefan Kühn is rewriting the script that extracts geo coordinates from the database dumps, and he has many other things to do. I don't blame him. He's doing a very good work, when he finds some time for it. But even if he had a solution ready, current database dumps might not be available. Suppose database dumps were ready and WikiMiniAtlas was up to date, and I would have some idea for a contest among Swedish wikipedians to add more coordinates to articles with prizes being awarded to the top ten contributors. That's the kind of project for which I could apply for money. That money could cover some costs for the toolserver or for the ticket for somebody to go to the developer meeting. It would have many good side effects. Of course, the WikiMiniAtlas is just one example of a very successful toolserver project that could generate such benefits. Another example: Apparently the Dutch Wikipedia community has some tool (?) to facilitate image uploading, that we might want to adapt to Swedish. But that's not running on the toolserver today, so we would also have to find somewhere to host it. This can of course be solved, but what would the best solution be? My question: when we see such opportunities, how can we make better use of them? The toolserver team has a list of "stable" services which are (at least) more stable than the rest. But how can we invest in making them even better and more stable, so other projects can build upon them? One idea that I had was to transfer such projects to the central Wikimedia servers, and make them a part of the WMF infrastructure. This would hopefully make the services more stable, and free up resources for more experimentation on the toolserver. Lately, I've become more skeptic about that plan, since they seem to have more work than they can really handle. Another idea is to set up a separate toolserver for Scandinavia. I heard some rumours that Wikimedia Norge (Norway) has resources to do this. But perhaps it is wiser to invest in the existing one? I'm very happy that the new hardware has arrived and is being installed. It's unfortunate that it took so long for this to happen. How can we make resource planning work smoother in the future? There are millions of users who expect us to perform better, and I think they will send money if we ask them. What are we short of? Money? Then say so. People? What kind? So, who is the idiot that writes this message? I'm user:LA2 and my full name is Lars Aronsson. I'm a C/UNIX programmer from Sweden. Back in 1992 I started to scan old Scandinavian books under the name Project Runeberg, http://runeberg.org/ and after having started to scan encyclopedias (not just poetry and novels), finding Wikipedia was a perfect match. I've scanned two minor encyclopedias for the German and English Wikisource. I've also been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap since 2005. I happened to visit Berlin in 2004 when Wikimedia Deutschland was formed. In October 2007 I helped to create Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden) and has been a board member since. In 2008 we organized Wikipedia Academy in Sweden. That's not the only idea we have copied from the German chapter. We're now in talks with libraries and archives to see if we can have some major content exchanges. I've been to Wikimania in Frankfurt (2005) and Alexandria (2008). -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/

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servers changed: www, sql-s1
by River Tarnell 03 Mar '09

03 Mar '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 hi, sql-s1 is now pointing at rosemary, and the web server has been moved to wolfsbane. please report problems with either server by opening a request in the TS project in JIRA. - river. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (HP-UX) iEYEARECAAYFAkmr9vQACgkQIXd7fCuc5vLhNgCfVFUysPjaRgNAKbKvdm75bzFJ 73QAn3W0qA6iDoz650XtVYsgRUpF3Q7K =p5fZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Toolserver-l March 2009