> 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/
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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)
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)
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]]
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)
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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)
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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
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]]
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
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)