[Foundation-l] WikiStats at Home

[Brian McNeil]

For most statistical analysis projects this would likely be non-contentious
and a WikiStats at Home toolset could prove very useful.

It raises a number of challenges that would need resolved.
*	Development of the client/server software
*	Promotion of the project to get enough machines to make it useful
*	Potential conflict with the privacy policy in some cases
*	Structuring of analysis projects for distributed processing

The first one is - I suspect - the biggest stumbling block. If wholly
developed by Foundation staff you would likely spend more money than the
price of a couple of high-powered servers to "lend" to people carrying out
statistical analysis. Were it possible to delegate the work to volunteer
developers this cost could possibly be avoided. Perhaps some enthusiastic
student could carry this out as part of their PhD. I'd like to think there's
still a lot of mileage in researching distributed computing models that
could make this worth someone's while.

The last point is where this approach places a significant burden on the
person attempting the analysis. Not all problems can be resolved in a
parcelled-out distributed manner. Some analyses just require huge gobs of
memory and the application of brute force.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Damian Finol
Sent: 26 March 2008 21:32
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 48, Issue 198

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From: Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org>
| Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated
| To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
| 	<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
| Message-ID: <47EA8364.7030104 at wikimedia.org>
| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
|
| Brian wrote:
|> PS: Why doesn't the Foundation readily give Erik a server that he can use
|> whenever he needs to? From my own memory at Wikimanias he has been
promised
|> by both Jimbo and Sue, and yet he has still never gotten one.
|
| We don't have a machine dedicated to stats generation yet; core
| operations still take priority, and old machines aren't suitable for a
| script that apparently needs massive amounts of memory to process its
data.
|
| I should note that it would probably be useful to ensure that stats
| generation scripts are available in the public source repository.
|
| -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)


Probably talking crazy here, but why don't we develop something alike
SETI at HOME?.

I would run something that will process a segment of data like SETI at HOME
no problems in my PC and every PC at work ;).

Regards,

Damian.

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