[Foundation-l] Downtime error message turned into monolingual

[Peter Coombe]

On 10 December 2010 00:47, Peter Coombe <thewub.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Ah disregard the first part of my message. Gmail wasn't including the
semicolon as part of your link. I copy pasted it to get the right one.
Yes, I definitely remember that being multilingual as well, wonder
what happened to it?

My comment about the 404 message being poor still stands though.

Pete / the wub