The wikipedia is working much better since the work was done on it. I seem to be able to do anything I want in the morning and afternoon without any problems. But in the evening it slows to a crawl and access becomes extremely sporadic leaning to impossible. Might that be the time when Google and other search engines set their automatic bots loose to trawl for new articles? Or maybe it's just due to general access demands.

I've got a feeling it's related to timezones. I'm in Australia, on the opposite side of the world to most Wikipedia contributors...