[Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual

[Peter Coombe]

On 9 December 2010 23:50, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> KIZU Naoko wrote:
>> I've got an error message in trying to access Japanese Wikipedia. It
>> seems long, but it's not my topic.
>> IIRC the message from server was multilingualized years ago and we
>> have offered the message with links to other lang
>> same messages.
>>
>> The message itself seems not changed from the past, but now it's in
>> English and only without any links to any other language.
>>
>> What happened? Who decided to remove lang links? And what is the idea
>> behind of this removal?
>
> Hi.
>
> I believe you're referring to this error message:
> <http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/&>.
>
> I remember it being multi-lingual as well. It was also enormous. I'm not
> sure when or why it was shortened (though my suspicion is that it was
> shortened because it was enormous). The planning for the message appears to
> have taken place here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_error_messages
>

Are you sure you're not thinking of this message?
http://www.doxaliber.it/wp-uploads/images/wikipedia_down_big.jpg

I think you still get that one if there's a server problem, but short
of getting a plane to Florida and randomly flicking switches I can't
confirm that! Obviously it's good because its multilingual, but also
because it has a donate link.

The 404 error you linked to (http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/&amp) could
certainly be improved, though as far as I know it's always been like
that. Absurd really, how many users who've mistyped an address are
going to want a database dump?

Pete / the wub