[Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24

[Thomas Morton]

> unless, as Tim already addressed, you wanted a developer
assigned to updating the message in real time.

No, definitely not what was being suggested.

This is the error message that appeared for me (and apparently others):
http://nomulous.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/wikipedia_error.png

As you can see it refers to some unknown error. In this case the
maintentance was known and* pre-planned* for several days.

A lot of people were confused by the outage and the error page was unhelpful
to them. This could have been mitigated simply by editing that
page temporarily to say "Our servers are undergoing scheduled maintenance,
which has resulted in some downtime. This should be concluded by 14:00 UTC,
please be patient whilst the maintenance progesses."

And this is the extent of my suggestion to improve our communication with
readers.

Tom

On 25 May 2011 11:02, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Thomas Morton
> <morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > That's interesting, what was the wording for the maintenance message? I
> only
> > ever saw the default "our servers are experiencing a technical problem"
> > error page.
>
> I could be misremembering, because I honestly didn't care that much,
> but I do believe I saw the word "maintenance" in there somewhere.
>
> Either way, it was as informative as any message could be under the
> circumstances—unless, as Tim already addressed, you wanted a developer
> assigned to updating the message in real time.
>
> Austin
>
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