I thought I said something about this...maybe not.
I was interviewed by a NYT reporter on Tuesday or Wednesday. Jimbo told me is was going to be (perhaps already have been) interviewed as well. The subject of the article is collaborative websites. The reporter seemed to take an interest in wikis generally. I can't tell you how prominently Wikipedia might feature in the article--it might just be one or two sentences, but it seems odd that the reporter would call me first and interview me for something like 45 minutes if it were just going to be one or two sentences--and that he'd want to interview Jimbo as well. My totally unconfirmed suspicion is that Wikipedia might be *very* prominently placed in a long feature article.
If so, Wikipedia is going to flooded with traffic--at least as much as with the Slashdotting. Very possibly more, because it's quite possible that other news sources will pick the story up from the NYT, as often happens. This happened when Newsbytes and Computerworld picked up the Nupedia story last year.
It's totally within the realm of possibility that we will have an order of magnitude greater amount of traffic than we had during the Slashdotting. Now, the server can probably handle even that (right, Jimbo?) but I have my worries about the software.
Larry
On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Tim Chambers wrote:
lsanger@ross.bomis.com wrote:
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] PHP Wikipedia We don't know when the New York Times article is going to appear, but my understanding is that it could be as early as next Tuesday.
Then Jimbo wrote:
There's NO REASON to think that we need to hurry this because of the New
York
Times article.
I don't claim title to any special status as a Wikipedian, but I do closely follow Wikipedia-L and RecentChanges. This is the first I've heard of the NYT doing a piece on Wikipedia. Would someone in the know mind filling us proletariats in, please? :-)
<>< Tim
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