This is about 15 hours from now.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2009/7/30
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Downtime due to network maintenance, Friday July
31st 12:00 UTC
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello,
Due to a problem in one of our core routers in our Tampa cluster we need
to perform some network maintenance tomorrow, Friday July 31st around
12:00 UTC. We will be performing a software upgrade and reboot of the
router. This should not take more than a few minutes if everything goes
well. Unfortunately this means that practically all sites and services
will be down during that time.
For those interested: one of the line cards in the router failed earlier
this week. A replacement has arrived, but does not boot up correctly
after hot plugging. Because we want to upgrade the firmware anyway, we
will reboot the entire box.
Cheers,
--
Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org>
System & Network Administrator, Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Not to engage anyone further in this topic, I would appreciate it if the
moderators consider whether this has gone on quite long enough, and some
moderation is needed here.
I know several people have already switched to "nomail" for this list.
Risker
Stevertigo:
> And of course this violating concept appears to be indemic wherever
> people feel they can neglect transparency - as mandated in their own
> mandates, perhaps - making their deliberations in private and giving
> people only decrees and motions. Wales, who was for a long time our
> most upstanding proponent of openness, and who made it a point to deal
> personally and openly with nearly every issue that came up - on this
> very list, as a matter of fact - would be quite unhappy with this
> trend.
I like transparency too.
It makes me pause to wonder whether a dispute resolution mailing list
is actually against the grain of that. I've only recently signed up to
a couple of the mailing lists as I intend to get (and am getting) more
involved with Wikipedia. These lists have a pretty low profile, I'd
say.
Whilst these mailing lists are, I believe, open for everyone to join,
it still strikes me as a bit of a back door: I would have thought it
far more transparent to deal with all dispute resolution on the wiki
itself where people can see what's going on (and people can place
relevant links easily) rather than in an email list which is going to
have a rather different audience.
To put it another way, if I were an editor in dispute with someone
else and I wasn't subscribed to the mailing list and I become aware
the other person was discussing it there, I think I'd rightly feel
that there was something "going on" in a sort of conspiratorial way
and that a conscious effort had been made to circumvent tackling my
points.
The wiki (en, at least) doesn't seem short of ways and means to deal
with disputes. I'm somewhat sceptical about the motivation in creating
a new channel for disputes that requires all parties to sign up for an
email service to be fully cognisant of where that dispute is heading.
In a message dated 7/22/2009 7:01:10 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
sinewave(a)silentflame.com writes:
OK - so I think a fair summary of this proposal (correct me if I'm wrong)
is:
We should create a group of experienced BLP editors (or similar) to
edit a BLP that has been the subject of an edit war. The page would be
protected from editing by other (non-sysop) users.>>
Why do you say "non-sysop" ? Are you proposing this editing be limited to
admins ?
If so I'd vigorously oppose.
Will Johnson
**************What's for dinner tonight? Find quick and easy dinner ideas
for any occasion.
(http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?ncid=emlcntusfood00000009)
http://www.nytpick.com/2009/07/nyt-hypocrisy-paper-tries-to-crack.html
This is pretty much a random link which seems to give a useful summary, but
it seems like the New York Times didn't suppress the news about this guy
the same way they did about their own guy, and checking our article, it
seems we didn't bother either.
A daguerreotype of a well adjusted [[Phineas Gage]] holding the rod that
impaled his frontal lobes was recently discovered. It will be published in
The Journal of the History of the Neurosciences imminently. It was, in my
opinion, correctly uploaded to Commons under the Public Domain. It is, after
all, an uncreative photograph of a daguerreotype made in the 1850s by an
unknown photographer.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phineas_Gage.jpg
That said, have a look at the copyright text of the image claimed by the
gallery that took the photo.
http://brightbytes.com/phineasgage/index.html
**NOTE* We are not claiming copyright to the work of an anonymous 1850s
photographer but to the photograph we made of this object in our possession.
Since you can't upload a daguerreotype to the internet and no one else could
possibly have photographed this object for over 30 years, the only
photographs available are the ones we have made.*
*For several years we have had an informal business supplying images in our
collection <http://brightbytes.com/past_tense/index.html> to publishers,
film, and television producers. We often grant permission for educational
and non-profit usage.*
*High resolution photographs without a watermark are available for
reproduction. Contact us for information on usage fees.*
*
*My reading of this is that they claim copyright of the image and that they
often allow educational and non-profit institutions to use versions of the
images that contain watermarks.
I'm proposing that we start a resolution-l mailing list.
Yes, I know we talked about it a month ago, to the tune of about 100
posts, and it seemed that it wasn't going anywhere. But that was just
appearances. The reality is that the support was substantial, the
opposition was sub-articulate, and whatever substantive criticism
there was was largely based in some assumed misconceptions about its
scope (Thomas).
The real truth is that we have been waiting for Cary to fulfill one of
his many duties and create the list. That having failed, we have been
waiting on Cary to tell us why he has not. That also having failed, we
instead have just been waiting a month for Cary to say anything at
all. And he recently did, though there was little substance in it,
other than a threat to close the bug request. Which in fact, he just
did close as WONTFIX:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19414 . I'm sure he
thinks he's doing the right thing. Still, despite our recent
differences, we should welcome Cary's actual participation in our
discussion. Thank you Cary, we understand that you were just too busy
to give this proper consideration.
Anyway, we were talking about an open list for discussing dispute
resolution. Its scope will be broad, and its purpose will be to be
helpful. It will discuss particular disputes in general, conceptual,
and editorial terms, and facilitate immediate on-wiki dispute
resolution processes. It will also discuss dispute resolution concepts
in general, wherever that goes.
-Stevertigo
Architect of WP:CIVIL,
creator of Arbcom,
Inventor of those WP:Shortcuts
Greetings,
The IRC Group Contacts decided last year to hold a surgery every three
months where general IRC matters could be brought up for discussion in
an environment in which IRC people able to put those into action
(which includes all the contacts themselves) were present and
involved. Regrettably it took just over a year for the second meeting
to be organised, but this pattern will not be repeated!
Therefore we invite you to visit
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Meetings/August_2009>
and sign up for the meeting if you are someone interested in how IRC
runs and especially if you are responsible for one or more channels.
That page will shortly contain procedural information on how we intend
to structure the meeting to get the most out of it. For convenience, I
shall note that the meeting is at 1900Z on 3rd August 2009 in
#wikimedia-irc-meetings on freenode.
Yours,
Sean Whitton (seanw on IRC)
For the IRC Group Contacts
I have posted this message to the main public mailing lists to which I
subscribe and would appreciate circulation of the meeting's existence
to as many other languages/projects as possible as this is open to all
- but please note that the meeting will be held in English.
--
Sean Whitton / <sean(a)silentflame.com>
OpenPGP KeyID: 0x25F4EAB7