Wikipedia-l March 2003

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

65 participants
119 discussions

Wikipedia unscheduled downtime over
by Brion Vibber 27 Mar '03

27 Mar '03

Wikipedia was inaccessible from about 11:20 to 19:00 UTC this evening/morning/whatever it is where you are. The problem seems to have been triggered by a runaway database query on the francophone wikipedia; unfortunately coming during our busiest time of day everything just ground to a halt. I'll try to rig up some better protection from accidents of this sort in the future (automatic timeouts/kills for slow manual queries); in the meantime, sysops always be careful with your queries! Treat our server gentle, and she'll be good to you in return. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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can non-English Wikipedias move to another server?
by Chuck Smith 27 Mar '03

27 Mar '03

Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be on a seperate server than the English one, so we wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive English-language traffic killing us? Chuck ===== Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/ Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/ ___________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en français ! Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com

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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Is it possible?
by Matt M. 26 Mar '03

26 Mar '03

> > Is it possible if someone types the name of an article > > which doesn't yet have any text that that person could > > be sent to a search page for that topic. Thus, if I > > type http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen, instead > > of getting a page saying that this page doesn't exist, > > I would instead get the search results page? Would > > anyone else want this? > > I would not like it. I use this method (creating the URL of the page by > hand) sometimes when I want to create a page and there are no links to it, > or I am not sure. I do this too and I would find the proposed change frustrating. m

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Client-side caching updates
by Brion Vibber 26 Mar '03

26 Mar '03

On Sat, 2003-03-22 at 03:34, I wrote in wikitech-l: > Okay, experimental code is in CVS and running on test.wikipedia.org, > please give it a thorough tryout! > > Caching is now enabled for all browsers except for Internet Explorer 5.0 > and earlier (which apparently have some other dreadful problems, and > I've no means to test them). Well, I've gotten no feedback, so either no one checked or no one had any problems.... I've put the new client-side caching code on http://meta.wikipedia.org , which attracts at least some small traffic. Try it out and report any problems, 'cause I'm going to install this soon on all languages, and if your browser can't read any pages at all I'd prefer to hear about it beforehand. :) In summary: * Should eliminate problems with red links continuing to appear after the page is created (or blue links after the page is deleted) * Should eliminate problems with page layout not changing to reflect logging in or changing display preferences * Should, *I think*, fix "reload doesn't actually reload without also holding down control" problem with Internet Explorer * Client-side caching should now work on other browsers than IE. Early versions of IE (5.0 and before) are still blacklisted, as we had all kinds of trouble trying to accommodate 5.0 and I don't want to mess it up. ;) Some things this update does *not* do: * Cache pages on the server; this is only to allow your web browser to cache a page once it's been generated for you (but still be able to refetch automatically if it's changed when you revisit it). The invalidation mechanisms will help make server-side page caching work properly once it's added in the future, though. * Allow for caching of anything other than viewing pages, history lists, or the Recentchanges list. (Other things could be cached, though, they're just not yet keyed for it.) * Invalidate cached pages when you log out. * Make a distinction between preference changes that will and won't alter page display. (Overly aggressive in invalidating caches.) See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_strategy for more confusing prose. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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Argh... tooooooo slow !
by Guillaume 25 Mar '03

25 Mar '03

Bonjour, Wikipedia performance are worse and worse... :o( (I suppose that mean we are growing) It's now lagging too much on the french Wikipedia ! It can be not a problem, but I recently lost a 30 lines articles due of a server time-out. I got a error message and it was impossible to comeback to my page to retrieve my text. I want an option to have a article insertion process in a popup windows (for exemple selectable on the preference page). Like this, if the server is dead or lagging a much I will got an error on the popup windows and I keep my text on the other windows (I can save it to a next attempt). Please consider the problem. Aoineko

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leave of absence
by Tom Parmenter 24 Mar '03

24 Mar '03

I've been contributing to the Wikipedia with great enthusiasm for a year now, but it is time for a break. See you later and my best to everyone. Tom Parmenter Ortolan88

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eo stats, dankon!
by Chuck Smith 22 Mar '03

22 Mar '03

> http://eo.wikipedia.org/stats/ > > Unfortunately, I haven't yet put the eo stats into > the update queue, so > they only go up to january at the moment. I'll get > those updated... > > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) Thanks! Your rock! This is awesome... Chuck ===== Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/ Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/ ___________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en français ! Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com

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Wikimedia.org (that's with an "m" as in multimedia)
by Daniel Mayer 22 Mar '03

22 Mar '03

On Friday 21 March 2003 10:51 am Axel wrote: > That is a noble project, and if you stick to public domain or GFDL > pictures, it will be much nobler still. Please familiarize yourself > with the wealth of image resources listed under > > http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources > > I think Jimbo's suggestion of a free photo resource site is great. It > could work pretty much like the GIMP photo archive > > http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/ > > with a wiki-edited set of keywords for each photo, except it should > allow uploading of course, and needs to keep track of the license (or > lack thereof) and origin of each photo. Initially, we could seed the > database with all the photos from the public domain sources. Could be a > bit resource hungry though. > > Axel This is a most excellent idea. In addition to being a home to the Foundation, Wikimedia.org could also be the central repository of all types of resource media files (images, sounds, videos, GIS-based maps, maybe even indexed read-only source text documents ...) that could be used by all Wikipedia languages, Wiktionary, "WikiTextbooks", "WikiFiction" and whatever else we think-up. This project could be covered by the GNU-FDL by default, but IMO the GNU-FDL is poorly suited for media files... We can have a more extensive license discussion later but either way I would support a license (or several licenses) that has/have the same type of restrictions and protections as the GNU-FDL but is better-suited to media files. And, like Wikipedia pages the license(s) could be compulsory by default for all materials created by project contributors and uploaded to the website. "Fair use" media would be discouraged and could be allowed only on an interim basis for things we could potentially produce ourselves (such as an image of a famous building that still exists or person who is still alive). But some things we could not obtain a new copyright to (something for which we do not have a free media file for nor could obtain for practical reasons). These things would have to be clearly marked as "fair use" so that any downstream licensee for whom the use would not be fair, could easily exclude those media files from any Wikipedia-derivative work that might make use of the media (exact attribution would be absolutely required in order to discourage the copying of non-free media files and to make it as easy as possible for downstream licensees to ask the copyright holder for permission). But the general goal of the project should be to have the maximum amount of media under a free license. IMO this proposed project shouldn't necessarily be limited to media files that are already used by a Wikipedia or Wikiwhatever article. It could be a project onto itself that Wikipedia articles could use as its media resource (using the image and media namespaces just as we do now). This could also be a good place to figure out some better way to more intelligently index and add metadata to the content in order to facilitate media searches (even human made lists would work here but we've already tried that with Wikipedia with limited success). And of course, if there isn't a Wikipedia/Wiktionary article that makes use of a media file, then we would have no "fair use" claim to have that file on our server (even then we might be on shaky ground since many people will find the image first and not the article that makes use of the image - "fair use" media may have to be excluded from Google indexing for this reason). This should encourage a community of media producers to form whose goal would be to create a "free as in libre" media resource. The only problem I see is that it would be difficult to check for copyright violations (this may be a very important point - esp with some newly proposed legislation and the general insane paranoia in the media industry about file sharing). Come to think of it, our sever may also be abused by teenage garage rock bands looking for a distribution medium... -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) WikiKarma The usual at [[March 17]] PS if this project really takes off as "Wikimedia.org" then we might have to think up yet another name for the as-yet-to-be-named Foundation in order to avoid confusion. Sigh... I thought I had it nailed with Wikimedia. But we could still simply think of the media file repository as a shared resource for all Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary...).

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eo visitor statistics?
by Chuck Smith 22 Mar '03

22 Mar '03

I've just been asked for the visitor statistics to the Esperanto Wikipedia for an article about Esperanto webpages. Can someone please pass this information on to me? I asked for it several months ago and from what I remember, no one replied. Thanks, Chuck ===== Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/ Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/ ___________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en français ! Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com

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Okhrana and Google
by sannse 21 Mar '03

21 Mar '03

I just did a search on Google for "Okhrana" and came up with www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Okhrana&action=edit as the 10th hit. But that's a link to an edit page (and for some reason one without the "You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist.." explanation.) If edit pages show up in Google like this, that must really increase the number of confused nonsense edits. (It was looking for information for a stub to replace one of these that made me do the search in the first place.) Isn't there some way excluding edit pages from being seen by Google? sannse

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Wikipedia-l March 2003