John Tex wrote:
Recently, enwiki was apparently moved without warning to a new server. This caused the external toolserver to be unable to perform any analysis of enwiki information. One of the major users of toolserver is Gmaxwell, who performs several different beneficial processes using the toolserver.
He has posted to WikiTech-L explaining what happened and what the effects are: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034904.html
There is also an essay forming at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Toolserver
I urge everyone to visit one or both of the above links to learn more and to express your support for getting the situation resolved.
Johntex.
The tools at tools.wikimedia.de were not only used by the English Wikipedia, however. Things like the user edit count and Duesentrieb's CategoryTree tool were used by other language editions, as evidenced by the number of translations for CategoryTree.[1]
At the Vietnamese Wikipedia, the most popular user infobox linked to interiot's edit counter,[2] and the CategoryTree tool was even built right into the category structure there,[3] via a "cây" ("tree") link in every category page that contained subcategories.
tools.wikimedia.org is currently timing out for me, but I hope that it won't be down for any extended period of time. Although the English Wikipedia certainly accounts for a large chunk of the Toolserver's usage, other language editions -- which still worked just fine with the tools there -- will find it odd that the tools have just suddenly vanished.
If it has been disabled, please consider restoring access to these valuable tools; even though they don't yet work for the English Wikipedia or the Asian cluster wikis, there are a number of wikis that could still benefit from this service.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CategoryTree [2] http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti%C3%AAu_b%E1%BA%A3n:T%C3%B3m_t%E1%BA%AFt_v%E1... [3] http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%83_lo%E1%BA%A1i:T%E1%BA%A5t_c%E1%BA%A3