[WikiEN-l] Viral marketing?

[Dan Grey]

On 16/08/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> How much do the combined Wikimedia servers serve? What would happen if
> all the Wikimedia sites were redirected to the BBC for a day?

I don't think the new colo has a traffic meter, but before the June 7
move peak was about 120Mb/s, around 1/100th of the BBC's peak, so we'd
have no effect whatsoever. (In terms of traffic, we get about half:
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=6m&y=r&u=wikipedia.org/&u=bbc.co.uk
. Bear in mind the BBC has much more multimedia on their site than us,
hence the disproportionally high data flow for them.)

> It's like [[WP:BEANS]] - now that someone has tried, everyone else will too.

I don't know. One incident is news worthy. A second is "Already been
done. Goodbye" from the point of view of the media.
 
> They are abusing our site for corporate gain! Surely we have every right
> to block them! They at least owe us an apology for misusing our
> resources like this.

Our top priority has to be coming away from this without harming our -
or Jimbo's personal - reputation. Making big claims which could hit
the media without a high level of proof wouldn't be a Good Thing.

> Well, if they want to violate [[WP:POINT]], we can disrupt them back. To
> quote [[meta:Bash]]: You can, however, disrupt Encarta to make a point.
> I don't see why the same shouldn't hold for anyone who corporate
> entities who do the same to us.
> 
> Besides, if the BBC has 20,000+ employees on their side, how many more
> users do we have on *our* side? With the powers of Wikipedia and
> Slashdot combined...

Remember we only have a few hundred active editors on any one day. The
BBC's web infrastructure is extremely powerful - our is nothing in
comparison, and in turn /. is nothing compared to us!

Anyway two wrongs don't make a right.


Dan