On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:32 PM, Robert Ullmann rlullmann@gmail.com wrote:
No, the analogy is exactly correct; your statement of the problem is not. There is no reason whatever that a hundred other projects should have to wait six weeks to be "fair", just because the enwiki takes that long. Just as there is no reason for the person with the 30 second daily transaction to wait behind someone spending 30 minutes settling their monthly KRA (tax authority) accounts.
He's right, your analogy is misguided. You're placing importance on the time between the beginning of the round of dumps until the completion of the dump for a particular project, when what's really important is the time between dumps for that particular project.
Say that dumping project A takes 3 days, project B 8 days and project C one day. Your argument seems to be that since project C is the fastest to complete, it should be dumped first, because. But your argument doesn't take into account that these are not one-off transactions, but repeated ones.
If the dumping cycle is repeated monthly, starting on the first of the month, then project A will get their dump on the 4th, B on the 12th and C not until the 13th of the month. But C's previous dump will have been on the 13th of the preceding month, so just like A and B, C had to wait a month for their dump.