>> Why hasn't Wikistats been updated since May?
>Because Erik Zachte, the third party who makes them, hasn't updated his
scripts since May?
Excuse me?
In June I asked two times for new dumps, so that I could run stats once more
before the conversion to Mediawiki 1.5, knowing that I would not have time
for yet another upgrade of the scripts soon.
As soon as the dumps were available I tried to run the stats. It turned out
that the database had already been changed even before mediawiki 1.5.
Lots of archive data had been moved to another database for which no dump
was available at all!! And priorities were such it was not to be expected
soon. If someone bothered at all to announce that publicly, e.g. on
wikitech, I missed it, but it would not have changed much, expect saving me
time on finding this out myself.
Then mediawiki 1.5 upgrade occurred which brought a completely new database
scheme.
After a while Brion announced he would produce new dumps in xml format,
which would simplify things a lot. (It does)
So I waited for that. The new dumps came about mid July when I had started
to prepare for two Wikimania presentations.
A week after Wikimania I started to work on updating the scripts.
The new xml dump format makes things much simpler (and hopefully more
consistent), yet because I want to keep the script backwards compatible for
other mediawiki installations that use it, at least for a while, it was not
so simple to add code for the new dumps after all.
Let me tell you that the scripts are not exactly trivial. They contain many
thousands of line of perl code. Partly because old sql dumps became nearly
impossible to parse offline, but I got it working, within space constraints.
Partly because they do much more than simple counting, e.g. timelines
overview, category trees, wikibooks indexes, they have to process data in a
certain sequence for that, and also bother to present data somewhat
differently for each project.
So considering I could only start on this >> two weeks ago << I'm making
fair progress.
By the way, many people would like to see for more frequent dumps.
I also still do not know why dumps are not produced more often, but trust
there will be a good reason, probably performance.
There is no fixed schedule at all, one waits, people start asking for a new
dump, often get no answer, and finally it arrives, more or less once a month
these days.
Erik Zachte
Hello,
> You were able to solve the problem by adding hardware. Whether
> that is a victory or a failure is a matter of opinion.
See, a community knows about new hardware more, because
they pay for it. They do not pay developers and therefore do not
know what software optimizations were introduced. And we did
solve many problems by introducing software optimizations.
So far, operation of Wikimedia cluster is a pure victory.
> Yes, blindly hacking away, disabling useful functions at random,
> instead of analyzing where the bottlenecks were. It was very
> embarrasing to watch. The growth numbers in 2002-2003 for
> susning.nu (which still runs on a single server) show what
> software optimization can do, should you have chosen that path.
What we have now is content produced by massive
collaboration with a small export of it via our caches
to the open world.
Sir, we have profiling information. We know where our bottlenecks are.
We deal with those bottlenecks. I know how to do software optimization
for websites, though. Remove as much magic as possible, use very simplistic
methods, ...We could serve whole website as HTML files from single
Pentium4 box at gigabit speeds. We could drop accessibility and use
lots of AJAX for all content loading and interaction. We could use MediaWiki
as application server instead of script. There are still lots of challenges ahead.
There are ways to do things better.
If you have any specific ideas on how to 'optimize' all that - feel free.
Join into #mediawiki or #wikimedia-tech channels, discuss about profiler
output with developers, brainstorm on how things can be done better.
I also have cases in my portfolio of 'growth numbers', but none of
them reached the scale of Wikipedia, neither in load, neither in variety
of users, neither in size of content. And we did have bigger fulltime
development/operations teams, budgets as well.
Cheers,
Domas
I have scheduled an open meeting for September 17 to discuss lessons
learned in the current drive that can help us improve the next drive.
Everyone is welcome to attend. If we arrive at any good ideas, these will
be conveyed to the Board and officers, who are meeting on September 18.
The meeting will be at 18:00 UTC in the #wikimedia-meeting channel on IRC.
Add your comments and suggestions to the meeting page, which can be found
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_meeting%2C_September_2005
Tim Shell
I have an Idea for a Wikigame that perhaps, with
your resources and skills, you could develop and
market to generate income to help finance the Wiki
Foundation. The idea is a gift to the foundation,
should you decide to accept it, free of any
encumbrances, though I would like to be credited for
the original idea.
I thought of the game while exploring the "random
article" feature. I consecutively generate two random
articles and attempt to navigate from one to the other
using the links in the articles.(e.g Black
Guards->Ship in a Bottle(TGN episode)) Of course it
doesn't work 100% of the time but that can be worked
out by limiting the random generation to articles
that will link. I find it educational as well as
entertaining in that it requires the player to read
the article and formulate the best route to the
destination.
Once you begin playing with the idea you will see
that there is a lot of room for developing software to
facilitate several variations of this theme: A
solitary mode with it's own scoring system and a
multiplayer mode. The software could ensure that
pathways exist from the starting point to the
destination article.
Various scoring systems are possible. Points
awarded for time, shortest route, points deducted for
backtracks, loops, rereading the destination article
and so on.
I believe that with a little work this idea could
be developed into a marketable form that could
generate income for the Foundation and allow it to
become self pamatronizing(a word I use to avoid the
gender specific connotations of patronizing).
If you consider this to be a potentially viable
concept I would be more than happy to participate in a
discussion group concerning it's development.
Sincerely
Jody Fulford
____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
Anthere, thanks for you extensive reply on my previous mail.
Jimbo, thanks for recognizing that my remarks are meant constructively.
Anthere, I hope you did not think of me as one of the guys who threw 'oil on
the fire'. If so, I would feel very sorry for that.
I certainly did touch on a sensitive issue when tensions were already high.
Erik Moellers resignation is the apotheosis of a longer time of difficult
relations between him and the board. So his announcement will have done
little to make your wikibreak bear fruit. And then, on top of that, I made
some remarks about the role of the board, as if you did not have enough on
your mind yet. Maybe I should have postponed my reaction and should not have
jumped up immediately to try to put this event in a broader perspective.
At the other hand: part of my point is exactly that it may be useful to make
roles and rules more explicit in times when everyone is on a good footing
with each other, since it is much more difficult to discuss these things
when emotions are already running high, and conflicts have started. So with
hindsight I illustrated my point inadvertently with my initial mail. Let me
quote from my first mail to emphasize this even more: "So let us be inspired
to clarify roles, responsibilities and procedures, at a time when we can do
without in many occasions, in preparation for a time when we might need more
clarity and transparency badly."
Anthere, not all of my questions are addressed (to be clear about this, you
did elaborate on how you see the role of the officers, but not the
jurisdiction of the board, perhaps you think this is self evident by its
actions) but I will happily defer this discussion till a later time, and
move half of this mail into my drafts folder.
Oh one more thing: I'm one those guys that, as Chris described, does not
often write a mail to tell I'm happy with how things are going.
Maybe I should, but these lists get spammed with trivia already far too
much, and I feel a mail about how I have nothing to say, apart from that
things are going well, or how I also support a decision that is already
approved by most writers, would be quite trivial indeed.
So for the record, I'm in some cases reasonably happy with how things are
going, and in many cases very.
And still euphoric after Wikimania by the way.
Enjoy your wikibreak. :-)
Erik Zachte
Passing on a suggestion sent to the board. Has anyone heard of this or have
any opinion on whether it would be a useful addition to our fundraising page?
Angela.
> ---- Forwarded message ---
>
> >
> > Wikipedia is using Paypal for fundraising. May I
> > suggest that www.sozialbank.de has a very convenient
> > system for fundraising and probably would accept
> > Wikipedia foundation as a customer?
> > Sozialbank is a bank especially for non-profit
> > institutions and would be much better suited for
> > a convincing foundraise of a non-profit.
> >
> > At least for european customers they should be able
> > to offer a web interface where money transfer is
> > possible immediately.
>
---- End forwarded message ---
Hi,
In the last time we had several cases where spammers uploaded images on
different wikipedias and used the pictures in html emails, trying to
sell chairs, grammophones or whatever.
Usually the uploads were the only contributions of said user, and the
license was missing.
It's maybe worth to consider disabling uploads on the projects which
don't really need it but can use commons (such as the german wikipedia
whose image upload policy is entirely compatible with commons and
especially all the smaller wikis which are not constantly watched).
Crosspost to wikitech and wikipedia-l, but please answer on foundation-l
since this is a project wide policy issue.
greetings,
elian
PS: I'll be away (on holiday) for the next three weeks, so don't expect
an answer from me, only posting this to the list to make people aware of
the issue.
I agree with Mark on this. Turning off external linking, if such a
thing could be made possible, would be much more helpful than
disabling images. Having all non-fair-use images go to commons would
be great, but I'd rather wait until Single Login was implemented
before enforcing this.
I've included Mark's post below since it was sent only to wikitech and
this thread should be kept on foundation-l.
Angela.
On 8/22/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with what you said about the German Wikipedia, however:
>
> I sharply disagree with what you said about "all the smaller wikis
> which are not constantly watched"... which Wikis are you talking
> about? The Small Wikis Monitoring Team (SWMT) closely watches all
> recent changes on all inactive / low activity Wikimedia wikis
> (excluding inactive Wikinewses) -- Wikipedias, Wiktionaries,
> Wikiquotes, Wikibookses... -- and this includes image uploads.
>
> So far, there have been no such abuses of image uploads on any of
> these wikis. There has been uploading of porn images (all of which
> Angela or someone else has expressly deleted), and to strange images
> (for example of a frog wearing a hat, for a spam page on the Gothic
> Wikipedia), but these are relatively infrequent, especially compared
> to linkspam (largely from China, Russia, Germany, and also
> pharmaceutical and porn linkspam in English).
>
> Besides, "small wikis" is a very imprecise term. What do you define as
> "small"? Does it need more than 10.000 articles? More than 1.000? More
> than 100? More than 10? More than 1? "Small" is a relative term. A
> user of the Sicilian Wikipedia may not nessecarily think of theirs as
> a small Wikipedia, with nearly 2.000 articles now, but they would
> probably consider the Friulian Wikipedia to be small, with nearly 90
> articles. German Wikipedians might consider the Chinese Wikipedia to
> be small, with under 30.000 articles. It's a matter of perspective --
> many English Wikipedians seem to think that the English Wikipedia is
> THE Wikipedia, and that it is somehow entitled to better treatment or
> that it is much more important or something, as one can see from some
> of the complaints lodged by English Wikipedians against the transition
> to the international portal, and the incessant whinging that followed
> for a number of weeks. Yes, the English Wikipedia is the largest, but
> it did certainly get a head-start because it was started earlier than
> all other Wikipedias. The German Wikipedia, for example, is doing
> quite well considering it was founded well after the English
> Wikipedia.
>
> Mark
Hi,
Since I idn't get any answer from wikitech-l and that is not a really a
technical issue, I post again here.
Yann
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Problem with Wikimedia IRC channels
Date: Saturday 20 August 2005 19:50
From: Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org>
Hi,
Thanks Datrio for your answer.
Le Friday 19 August 2005 19:13, Dariusz Siedlecki a écrit :
> 2005/8/19, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net>:
> > Can someone explain me why I got this when trying to join Wikimedia
> > IRCchannels ?
>
> I can't see anything on the ban list, which could be a ban for your
> hostmask. Could you try joining #wikipedia? There are no bans there.
>
> Also, what's your hostname? PM me when you'll connect to the server
> (my nick's Datrio).
I was told that I was banned because I use Tor.
However I DO NOT use Tor to connect to IRC and Wikimedia channels and I have
a registred nick. Therefore I really don't understand why I am banned.
Thanks,
Yann
--
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