Wikipedia-l October 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

82 participants
190 discussions

Is a press release now a good idea?
by Daniel Mayer 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Jimbo wrote: >It is my belief that the next round of upgrades, i.e. the >big Opteron server for $6,000 that we will buy once >contributions reach a high enough level, will give us >around 10x our October 1st capacity. That's substantial, >and we'll take a while to outgrow that. And in the >meantime, we'll be constantly raising money to stay >ahead of the curve. Sweet! But what should be our headline announcement? http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia's_first_press_release is announcing our 300,000th article, but that is based on the article count of only our MediaWiki Wikipedia versions. It does not count the 20,000+ articles still under UseMod (we missed the real 300,000 milestone because we simply were not ready yet). It may just be me, but I think at this point we should just wait a couple to a few weeks for the more inclusive and exciting-sounding "one third of a million" milestone. The number of non-English articles should also outnumber the English ones by then, so we could also announce that. What do others think? This could be something we allow each Wikipedia version to decide on its own (en.wikipedia already had a X00,000 press release this year, so something a bit different would be nice, at least for en.wikipedia). But that may be confusing for multilingual press and readers given the different article counts. But before we decide on anything, could somebody check my math here http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics#2003_Statis… ? I may have overcounted the UseMod wikis.... -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Is a press release now a good idea?
by Walter Vermeir 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

I think it is now not a good time for a general press relase. - search does not work - wikipedia is very slow - the logo-stuff, who is willing to explain that to a visitor? - only gifts by paypall - no need for more publictiy Look at the stats, every month more and more users. -- Contact: walter AT wikipedia.be Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie http://www.wikipedia.be

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Is a press release now a good idea?
by Daniel Mayer 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Thomas R. Koll wrote: >How about restricting the press release to >foreign languages? Doubling German users >is not that heavy like doubling English users. Well the non-English versions are going to be released a week before the English one either way. The big thing I'm waiting for is the server upgrades. As soon as that happens we should go ahead and distribute the non-English press releases (with the English version following a week later). -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Database error when moving pages. Server crash issue?
by Ulrich Fuchs 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Have there been any updates on the german Wikipedia Software since yesterday, or ist this a problems arising out of the server crash? When moving a page, I'll get this message: Es gab einen Syntaxfehler in der Datenbankabfrage. Die letzte Datenbankabfrage lautete: "UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY searchindex SET si_title='europäische wildkatze' WHERE si_page=19358" aus der Funktion "SearchUpdate::doUpdate". MySQL meldete den Fehler: "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)". However, the page seems to have been moved correctly. Uli

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Server back up after partial crash
by Brion Vibber 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Sorry about the downtime today; everything _should_ now be back up and running. On first look this seems to be similar to the crashes we've gotten on the server all too frequently since we acquired it: one of the disks froze up and wouldn't respond anymore until the machine was rebooted -- which was complicated by the machine not being willing to reboot until it had cleanly unmounted the disks, which it couldn't do because it had to wait until the disk responded... Anyway, the parts for upgrades should be arriving over the next few days and the machine can be rebuilt early next week. If the problem is related to the motherboard, that should resolve it once and for all. If it's a problem inherent to the disks, well, that won't help, but it'll reboot faster! ;) And we'll have a better idea where the problem lays. Since it was the secondary disk that halted this time, not the primary, we did get some info in the logs. If anyone out there is familiar with decoding SCSI failures on Linux, I posted a log extract on wikitech-l: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-October/006314.html -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Server back up after partial crash
by Angela 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

Vancouverguy wrote: >Umm...it's been giving me an intermittent "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error. That is because there is a limit on how many pages you can open within a certain time period. The limit is currently very low to prevent overloading the server. You just have to work really slow or go off to make coffee every so often. It's driving me mad, but I expect the limit will be raised when the new server comes. Sometimes changing browser will solve it. In Mozilla, I am totally banned from editing for a few minutes, but if I then switch to IE, it often lets me edit, (but sometimes doesn't let me write anything in the edit summary field). Strange. Angela. ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk

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Upgrades on the way!
by Jimmy Wales 03 Oct '03

03 Oct '03

I've just gotten word that Jason will be going to San Diego tonight to upgrade the machines! Of course, nothing ever goes wrong with hardware upgrades, and computers always work, so we can expect to be fully upgraded and functional very quickly. Or, reality check, let's all hope for the best. :-) --Jimbo

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Re: Wikipedia-l logo (Erik)
by Anthere 02 Oct '03

02 Oct '03

I hereby resign my role as contest coordinator, as the original contest is finished, but will provide assistance if necessary for any new vote. Regards, Erik Since I criticize a couple of time, I wanted to say thanks for the great job nevertheless. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

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Logo results as tallied pairwise (Condorcet)
by Rob Lanphier 02 Oct '03

02 Oct '03

As both a check on the election results, and as a demonstration of pairwise voting, I decided to do the following: * Download the ballots cast in this contest * Run them through a program I wrote to parse them into a format I'm used to working with (with candidate translation list I manually created). * Tally the votes using the Condorcet calculator In using this technique, the winner of this election remains the same (1a). However, it's still interesting to see the nature of the pairwise matchups. In particular, the race for second place was really close (option 2c beat option 10 by five votes). It was even closer before I noticed I missed the international ballots (without those ballots, 10 beat 2c by a vote). You can see the complete results here: http://www.electorama.com/2003/wplogo-pairwise/ Rob

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Logo ratification and variants
by erik_moeller＠gmx.de 02 Oct '03

02 Oct '03

The new logo has been ratified by all Wikipedias. I have asked Paullusmagnus (the designer) to make the final modifications he deems necessary in accordance with the requests of various people who have made comments and will then replace the logos on the servers. I have asked him to create three different additional variants of the subtitle "Wikipedia", namely French, Latin and Esperanto. (I personally think it's very bad that the name is different in these languages. Many people have expressed a strong desire to keep the differences, though.) Further language variants may be designed as needed. In the past weeks, substantially different implementations and variations of the same logo concept have been created. Please take a look at them at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_logo_variants I believe Nohat's variants are especially noteworthy. However, these are not the logos people have voted for and it is doubtful that consensus can be reached to use one of them instead of the current one. I will be happy to be proven wrong here and encourage informal opinion polls in the next weeks to figure out how people feel about these logos. Failing consensus, given the current voter fatigue, I suggest revisiting the issue one or two months from now. This gives us enough time to work on new and exciting variants, and at that point, we may decide to hold another vote on whether we want to replace the current concept implementation or keep it. I hereby resign my role as contest coordinator, as the original contest is finished, but will provide assistance if necessary for any new vote. Regards, Erik

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Wikipedia-l October 2003