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

[Domas Mituzas]

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

technically this was unknown problem :) 

> 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."

We did not really know when we will fix it :) 

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

IMO we're discussing completely wrong things here. Site was down, doesn't really matter in what way ;-) 
I'm sure we'd look much more professional if our downtime message would always say "planned maintenance in process!" ;-)

Domas