Thanks very much for explaining Brion! I'm very pleased with what I hear about all that intergration on 1 machine. Sounds great.
Sorry for mentioning 'gods' It's just that I dislike the word 'meta', I would prefer the word "development" or "admin" or.... (?)
I'm now considering the following:
Read-Only Caching: Cache some of the wikipedia-documents on my own server for read-only. Just when I might want to edit, I 'll get redirected to your real wikipedia-server to read the latest version, and perhaps write..
Or maybe your server (or a second machine) might run a read-only version of the wikipedia-content, as a regular webserver?... Just for quick reading, there should be no locks. Locks are only required for writing documents (conflicts and such). For someone that quickly wants to read-only, it is no problem when he or she does not really get the *latest* version of that page, but a cached version from yesterday. .... ? ....
Well, anyway, thanks for your very informative and clear reply. Thanks to all other Wikipedia-maintainers as well for making Wikipedia possible.
Pieter
Brion Vibber wrote:
On ĵaÅ, 2003-01-30 at 15:33, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
Sorry for bothering again but I very much agree with the above. Having no solution, it is at least good to talk about it (clear and visible management, democracy, etc).
Great!
Maybe, closing down meta.wikipedia.org is a good idea?
What??! Why??
Are you saying that discussion about the site should be hidden away on a secret "hackers-only" wiki where people can't find it instead of the open-to-everyone meta wiki?
Or buried in a thousands-of-edits-per-day encyclopedia where people can't find it instead of a more leisurely specifically-for-discussion- about-running-the-site meta wiki? Buried on the English Wikipedia where people coming from other languages won't have a *clue* how to find things, and people who don't speak English don't have a chance of having their voices heard?
I say NO to that. Closing meta would be undemocratic, bigoted, and wrong in every way.
Designers, developers, programmers, administrators, etc should be on the 'normal' wikipedia, they should _not_ be 'gods'.
Not sure what this means.
This relates to (inter)language problem: there is no central wikipedia (or do you regard the English-speaking one, www.wikipedia.org, as the central one?).
meta.wikipedia.org is the central wiki for discussion about the workings of Wikipedia and plans for changing it. It is officially multilingual, and open to all (though _so far_ most content is only in English).
Wikipedia thus already DOES work with distributed servers, isn't it? (Spanish wikipedia is on another machine than the Dutch, and the English, etc?)
They're all on the same machine, and will be integrated further when the user accounts and upload sections are rolled into one to avoid the numerous headaches encountered currently by people working in multiple languages (separate logins; have to copy images multiple times, have to put in interlanguage links multiple times, etc).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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