Josip Rodin wrote:

Err, you don't need to remove the actual reason (inability to contact the database server) in order to make it "comprehensible". I wouldn't be surprised if the techies previously ignored the request because they refused to blithely dumb the message down.

What use is it to any user to know that the reason for the technical difficulty is an inability to contact the database server? Regular users do not (and are not supposed to nor expected to) care about this.

Regardless of that, though, the point was not to remove that -- if you want, you can leave that in, I don't mind. What I dislike about the message is that it says "the wiki" when the name of our website clearly isn't "the wiki", that it doesn't state that the problem is temporary, that it doesn't ask the user to try again later and that it doesn't apologise for the inconvenience.

Timwi