Wikipedia-l December 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

65 participants
109 discussions

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
by Chuck Smith 27 Dec '03

27 Dec '03

> Therefore, we're doomed until tomorrow morning. > Jason has a family > obligation tomorrow at 10AM, so he _could_ go down > tomorrow afternoon, > but only if we can't get someone at the colo to do > the reboot. If it's any consolation, I imagine you helped a lot of families stay together for Christmas. "What? I thought you said you were gonna work on Wikipedia today?" "Nah, I changed my mind [the server is down]." "Awww... too bad. Now you can spend time with your family!" Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Chuck ===== We are the Esperanto speakers who say "Ni!" http://www.esperantomobilo.org/ _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Información de Estados Unidos y América Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias. Visítanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com

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Re: Crashy opteron
by Jimmy Wales 25 Dec '03

25 Dec '03

Damned computers. Well, Tim is out of town. Jason is a couple hours away and there's no way I'm asking him to drive down on Christmas. The colo does not have 24x7 staffing, so no one is there to reboot it for us today. Therefore, we're doomed until tomorrow morning. Jason has a family obligation tomorrow at 10AM, so he _could_ go down tomorrow afternoon, but only if we can't get someone at the colo to do the reboot. At least the website is serving cached pages, maybe if someone has a chance, the cached-pages message could be updated to explain the time we expect editing to resume. >From now on when we think about how to spend money, we should think about this morning, and think about redundancy, which is expensive but probably necessary as we get bigger and bigger. --Jimbo Brion Vibber wrote: > While the new server is wonderfully fast, it's crashing way *way* too > often. :( > > Has the memory been tested? What kind of warranty do we have? Will > Penguin replace any defective parts? How long would this take? > > We *really* need a way to reboot it remotely. Somebody's going to have > to go in on Christmas day just to push the reset button, and that ain't > cool. > > sigh... > > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Database server down
by Brion Vibber 25 Dec '03

25 Dec '03

The database server has crashed again, during the regularly scheduled backup. We so far have no way to reboot this machine remotely, so it'll stay down until someone can go in and push the button. While it's very fast, it's also very unstable; it perhaps has hardware problems. With any luck, the manufacturer has given us a warranty of some sort for our very expensive purchase and will fix the thing. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Re: [Intlwiki-l] screwy statistics
by Jay Bowks 25 Dec '03

25 Dec '03

Hi Brion, thanks for responding to my panicky inquiry... From: "Brion Vibber" <brion(a)pobox.com> On Dec 24, 2003, at 12:57, Jay Bowks wrote: >> On the statistics page one reads: >> "The Interlingua version has rapidly decreased >> unexpectedly. This might be a temporary problem. " >> Somehow the number went from over 4000 >> articles to 2800 and then decreasing over >> each statistics check as if there are deletions >> taking place. >Who takes these statistics, how? Have there in fact been deletions? The stats I found were at: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics Paolo Castellina complained to me that a great number of his articles were missing, I took it to imply that these were deleted. I tried to explain that witht he software and domain name changes something may have been lost and I'd try to inquire about it. >Note that under the old software, administrative deletion of pages >would have left no trace and been irreversible. Ay ay ay... well checking the dates on the stats page the sudden decrease took place before the change to MediaWiki software and the Wiki was still under UseMod software. >> I've already requested to have access as >> admin which I had before the change over >> to the new software. >You've already been given it, no? Ok, if so, is there a place to check deletions? I got the uneasy feeling that someone or something a bot perhaps had gone berserk and started deleting pages, so I was getting panicky about it. How does one check for deletions in the new software? Again thanks so much for your help in all of this Brion, and kudos on the work you've accomplished in getting the other than English wikis up and running on the new software, after the initial shock that the capitalization had made a lot of pages invisible to the links, and many of us started changing titles over there have now been good comments about the new software. Overall it seems like the site is quite speedy, and this may perhaps only be a reflection of how many are away for the holidays and not editing, but things are flying... this is a good thing! With best regards always, Jay B. [[User:ILVI]]

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Shirt / Wikipedia-Logo
by Daniel Mayer 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Jimbo wrote: >My own view is that it is unlikely that the >Amazon link would bring in very much money anyway. >It's incidental revenue at best. If I'm right, >then there's no reason to have a big discussion >and fight over something that wouldn't matter much >anyway. It would not only be Amazon but /every/ similar service we could enter agreements with. I'm pretty sure that that would generate an not-insignificant amount of money (maybe enough to pay your cost for Wikimedia bandwidth). >I estimate, by the way, that if we accepted >google adwords ads, we could bring in $20,000- >$40,000 per month right now. So if we want to >have a big fight, we should fight about that. :-) Wow! Google ad-words are those little text ads on the right hand side of Google searches, right? Those seem to be very well-suited to whatever I am searching for and I in fact find them useful. However, we already have had one fork over just the rumor of advertising and some people have stated that they would leave the project if we started to have ads. I'm far more pragmatic and think that having something unobtrusive (and in fact useful to readers!) like Google adwords would be a great thing to have. But IMO, this should only be shown to non-logged-in users. Why? Well those people who are logged-in are much more likely contribute to Wikimedia by adding content, while those who don't log-in are most likely just to be readers. They should contribute as well by being exposed to unobtrusive (and in fact useful) adwords. A mock-up of a Wikipedia article with adwords will be needed. Then we should have a wide-ranging discussion on the pros and cons of having them. When that is done we should have a two-level vote: A Wikimedia-wide vote on Meta about whether to allow /any/ Wikimedia wiki to have adwords. If say 75% of Wikimedians vote to allow adwords at all then there would be a per wiki vote on the respective wikis on whether or not to have adwords on their wiki (75% margin needed there as well). Some problems; What are we going to do with all that money? If we can't spend it, would that jeopardize our nonprofit status? I think it would be a step backwards for Wikimedia to become a for-profit organization. Some possible ways to solve above problems; Hire mostly part-time executives (with maybe a full-time President) and programming staff and use the leftover money to fund paper/CD publication and distribution (heck maybe even buy ultra-cheap GNU/Linux boxes with all Wikimedia content preloaded on them). Just some thoughts. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree

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Disclaimer notices and category systems
by Daniel Mayer 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Neil Harris wrote: >At the moment, some articles have disclaimer >notices added (in addition to the general >disclaimer covering the whole encyclopedia, >of course). The new MediaWiki namespace has >recently improved things by allowing the text >of article disclaimer notices to be standardised >and updates automated. I think these disclaimers are very ugly and make us look unprofessional (most reference works don't start their articles with disclaimers!). I also think they are a bad idea since their absence implies that somebody should be able to trust the content. It is also self-referential and has links to a Wikipedia-namespace page. Having too many of these links adds an extra burden on third party users of our content who would want to remove the Wikipedia-specific references. It is ''far'' better IMO just to have a link to [[Wikipedia:Disclaimers]] at the bottom of every page. In fact I think I'll go ahead and do that this weekend. That would get rid of the need to place these ugly notices everywhere. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree

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External link spam
by Arvind Narayanan 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Hi, Several times I have seen external link spammage: someone, typically not logged in, adds links to their product/homepage etc. in several articles vaguely related to it. With the growing popularity of both wikipedia and spamming, we can only expect external link spam to increase ;^) When I see such links in the body of an article, I just remove the them (it is usually clear from the context whether it is spam or if it is a relevant link that needs to be moved to the external links section). But when they are in the external links section I'm not sure what to do. I think merely being related to the subject of the article is not enough justification for having an external link, it has to enhance the reader's understanding of the subject etc. So if it doesn't meet that criterion I think I can remove external links. Any objection? Arvind -- Its all GNU to me

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Need admin access after change over to new software
by Jay Bowks 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Thanks to Brion for the change over to the new software for some of the other languages. I have one request, though, the login for admin access is now different for the new software. I would like to be granted access once again... thanks. w/ regards, Jay B. [[User:ILVI]]

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Disclaimer notices and category systems
by Neil Harris 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Just a thought: At the moment, some articles have disclaimer notices added (in addition to the general disclaimer covering the whole encyclopedia, of course). The new MediaWiki namespace has recently improved things by allowing the text of article disclaimer notices to be standardised and updates automated. The process of adding these per-article notices could be made still easier when the name-value pair infrastructure is added by allowing the addition of _automatic_ disclaimer messages based on article category tags. These texts could be sysop-editable, in just the same way as the MediaWiki tags (or indeed might be implemented as MediaWiki tags). -- Neil

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Shirt / Wikipedia-Logo
by Daniel Mayer 22 Dec '03

22 Dec '03

Kurt Jansson wrote: >Erik opened an account at cafepress.com a while ago: >http://www.cafeshops.com/wikipedia That's really cool! I didn't know this existed. >Maybe he can update it to the new logo without much work. Yes, definitely. >Would it be okay for the foundation to get some money >through cafepress? I don't see why not. We would just have to charge more for each item so that the leftover money can go to the foundation. >If the answer is yes this would also be true for the Amazon >partnership program, right Uh oh - the 'A word'. There are a whole bunch of free software and/or anti-corporate zealots around here who hate Amazon and will always hate Amazon because they are a big bad corporation who uses software and business practice patents. Sadly that means we cannot partner with them unless we want to alienate many in the Wikimedia community and even risk mass defections and forks. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Wikipedia-l December 2003