Alex,

Do you not see that we are having weekly outages? So we hit 500k articles and lo, it holds together. Where do we go from here? With our one master database server. Somebody goes out and drops $100k on an 8-way 848 opteron. Somebody drops a further $100k on disk. Problem solved until we hit 100M articles. Right, because every single power ranger should have their own page, and every single villain, and every single care bear, and every character from charmed, and every dicdef that never makes it into the wiktionary, and so on and so forth.

You can't just say "let's just stick with what we're doing, it works for now, and we'll just grow the architecture we've got by throwing cubic dollars at it until it works properly."

You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.

It seems to me that you are proposing consolidation of articles (or specifically removing the ability for people to use multiple pages for multiple things from a single larger topic) as an architectural change. It seems to me that you are approaching this from the wrong side. As someone else pointed out, this does take away freedom from the writer. Who is to say that each villain from power rangers does not deserve their own page? What if the person writing is able to go into pages and pages of mind numbing detail about each character, and consolidation of these would take up a books worth of space? Also, if you force consolidation, you still run into the problem of characters that don't fit into "villain" or "good guy".

If you want to talk about architectural changes, then lets talk about code changes, or systems changes exclusively (lets try not to force users into an organizational scheme).

I mean, have you actually ever designed anything near as complicated as the wikipedia? Have you actually ever been in a board room with the program manager, project manager, VP, eight developers, and two sysadmins when you all realize at the same time that the architecture you've got just won't scale to the point you need it to?

How do you know he hasn't?

V/r,

Ryan Lane NAVOCEANO