According to the wikistats page
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm in English), Japanese
(ja:) is the 3rd-largest Wikipedia, after English and German, both in
terms of articles and in terms of active contributors. I haven't really
heard any discussion from there though---there's plenty of people from
the de:, fr:, and even lots of smaller Wikipedias here, but not many at
all from ja: that I've heard of. Anyone know how things are going on
over there? Do they know about the Wikimedia Foundation and have any
interest in it or requests or concerns or whatnot?
-Mark
Tim Starling wrote:
> An extra feature
> has been added to MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with the help
> of redirects. A link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the German Wikipedia
> will link to http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, which will redirect to
> http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .
I'm not sure that is such a good idea, performance-wise... ideally, it
should go straight to the correct URL. People would otherwise constantly
use "Copy link to clipboard" on these links and fill the web with
nonsense links like http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, and we would
forever have to keep the redirects working. They are starting to become
a little difficult to keep track of, and I'm afraid it's only a matter
of time until we will inadvertantly create an infinite loop of redirects
somewhere.
In general, redirecting mechanisms should probably be revised to
redirect straight to the correct place.
What is the longest chain of redirects we have so far?...
http://wikipedia.com/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a
302 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/a
301 -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
So there are three things I see that are wrong here:
1. Those redirects should all be 301s, not 302
2. All of those URLs should 301 directly to
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A
3. Nothing should link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:a (but a
[[Wikipedia:de:a]] link on en.wiktionary.org would, according to what
you said, causing two unnecessary redirects for every visitor that
clicks on the link).
For those who don't already know what's so bad about redirects: (1) Even
just one redirect doubles(!) the server's response time. That is
extremely noticeable when the servers are slow, which they are almost
always. (2) They cost Wikimedia an extra bit of bandwidth. I know this
is pretty miniscule, but at the rate that we seem to be creating new
redirects, it's going to make quite a difference pretty soon. (3) I'm
not sure about this one, but I would imagine that they are detrimental
to the Google ranking of the linked-to page.
Greetings,
Timwi
The domain http://www.wiki.produkt-mix2.de/ obviously copies content from the
german language Wikipedia and is not complying to the GNU FDL at all.
What is more, they do not even mirror our content, they draw all content
online and directly from our servers. Can we block them from accessing our
servers somehow?
Uli
I've set up Wiktionaries for all 146 languages that have a Wikipedia.
There's known teething problems, however they should be good be working well
enough now for people to get started. The most important problem is that
many languages have a project namespace of "Wikipedia" (or the
transliterated equivalent), but the interface messages point to
"Wiktionary". I suggest that for the time being, people should put pages in
the real Wikipedia: namespace, and set up redirects from the Wiktionary:
pseudo-namespace where necessary. Wiktionaries with no language file, or
with language files which use $wgMetaNamespace, do not suffer this problem.
The MediaWiki namespaces have been copied from the associated Wikipedias,
with the local term for "Wikipedia" replaced by "Wiktionary".
To request adminship or bureaucratship on the new wiktionaries, go to:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_Wiktionary_permissions
I've set up a few basic kinds of interwiki links, which may be expanded or
modified in the future. The "w:" prefix should link to the Wikipedia in the
same language. Language prefixes link to other language Wiktionaries. To
link to a different language Wikipedia, use [[Wikipedia:xx:Page]].
This brings the total number of wikis to 298. There's a few technical and
administrative changes which occurred to make this happen. Stewards should
know that they can change the rights of users on the wiktionaries by
appending "wiktionary" to the language code, e.g. "Tim
Starling@frwiktionary" . Wikis such as sources and sep11 can now only be
accessed by appending "wiki", i.e. metawiki, sourceswiki, quotewiki,
sep11wiki and textbookwiki.
Another change is that the English Wiktionary has moved from wiktionary.org
to en.wiktionary.org, bringing it into line with the rest of the
wiktionaries and with Wikipedia. There are redirects of course, so links
won't be broken. The only links that were broken during the construction of
these wikis were images uploaded to the English, French or Polish
Wiktionaries. The directory layout was rearranged to minimise the overhead
per wiki.
-- Tim Starling
Hi all..
In the Arabic Wikipedia (as with other Wikipedias) we suffer from poor
speed/performance, and a feature-stripped mediawiki (search-disabled and
so).. Anyhow, one of the members in the Arabic Wikipedia contacted me,
telling me that he can get Server power, and cover yearly costs for
Bandwidth/placement in a data-center.. But he said that he wanted to
have that server/bandwidth dedicated to the Arabic Wikipedia..
I wanted to know about the possibility of that.. is it "Technically"
possible ? of course, everything is under the Mediawiki foundation
umbrella, and server full access will be only for the mediawiki
developers in charge of such thing..
If that is absolutely not possible.. will it be possible to have a new
server added to the existing server farm, having it's cost covered, but
enabling all the nice feature for Arabic Wikipedia (after all we are
only 650 articles or so), and have a certain priority for Arabic
Wikipedia, while having the server doing what other servers do ?
The current performance/speed/status of Arabic Wikipedia (and other
wikipedias) is not a very good one.. and sooner or later
Language-limited donations will come, and they will be have to be dealt
with.. after all, full control is, and will always be, in the hand of
the mediawiki developers/admins .. the only difference is that the
server layer will be differently organized in a way to allow to dedicate
resources to wikipedias..
I hope I will get a clear response, as my previous attempts to reach for
a response did not give me one..
Yours
Isam Bayazidi
Arabic Wikipedia
Amman - Jordan
As we have a growing number of images which are taken by non-wikipedians
who have given permission to allow their image to be used under GFDL, it
might be a good idea to keep a central permanent record of these
permissions.
So along those lines, I'd like to suggest something like
permissions(a)wikipedia.org be setup so when anyone gets email permission to
use an image they can just forwarded it to that address.
Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran
In a message dated 5/7/2004 5:55:52 PM Eastern Standard Time,
isam(a)bayazidi.net writes:
Hi all..
In the Arabic Wikipedia (as with other Wikipedias) we suffer from poor
speed/performance, and a feature-stripped mediawiki (search-disabled and
so).. Anyhow, one of the members in the Arabic Wikipedia contacted me,
telling me that he can get Server power, and cover yearly costs for
Bandwidth/placement in a data-center.. But he said that he wanted to
have that server/bandwidth dedicated to the Arabic Wikipedia..
I wanted to know about the possibility of that.. is it "Technically"
possible ? of course, everything is under the Mediawiki foundation
umbrella, and server full access will be only for the mediawiki
developers in charge of such thing..
If that is absolutely not possible.. will it be possible to have a new
server added to the existing server farm, having it's cost covered, but
enabling all the nice feature for Arabic Wikipedia (after all we are
only 650 articles or so), and have a certain priority for Arabic
Wikipedia, while having the server doing what other servers do ?
The current performance/speed/status of Arabic Wikipedia (and other
wikipedias) is not a very good one.. and sooner or later
Language-limited donations will come, and they will be have to be dealt
with.. after all, full control is, and will always be, in the hand of
the mediawiki developers/admins .. the only difference is that the
server layer will be differently organized in a way to allow to dedicate
resources to wikipedias..
I dont see why it should be a problem, but I would add a stipulation--that
the Arabic server take another small Wiki under its wing (and server), so as to
prevent a fork, and help the folks there grow too.
BTW, Arabic is growing remarkably well, and I want to thank Isam for all his
efforts there.
Danny.
>
>== Different topic, probably more important: ==
>
>Is there anything we can do for supporting a soon and smooth change of
>the character encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, as long as the German
>Wiktionary is tiny? (I'm also willing to support the to utf-8
>transformation of the Wikipedia, off course. But there the constraints
>differ slightly, due to it's magnitude, and some days more or less to
>wait are off less influence on the effort.)
de wiktionary is not yet in utf-8 ? all wiktionary should be.
>Back to Wiktionary: I've
>saved a Lang.php to
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageWiktionaryDE.php
>
>in order to allow checking and improvement, so that it hopefully will
>become suitable for usage, but probably it's not required any more as
>de.Wiktionary is operational already.
>
LanguageDe.php is common for all wikis in de language. There's no a special language file for wiktionary.
(except for de maybe, there is 2 language file, 1 utf-8, 1 non-utf8 as de.wikipedia is not yet in utf-8)
Shaihulud