On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
lsanger@ross.bomis.com wrote:
No, the best thing of all would be something that can instantly and *without loss of data or format* transfer Wikipedia pages from UseModWiki into Wikipedia code. We could call this Encyclode (encyclopedia + code). On the other hand, that might be lame. That's just my idea. :-)
My lame name suggestion is Pediawiki. "Which wiki software does wikipedia run? Wikipedia runs Pediawiki! It's the wiki software designed for encyclopedias!"
Huh, I have to admit that my suggestion is lamer than yours.
Jimbo mentioned the possibility of a CVS system--wouldn't take long to set up. Unfortunately, it's Friday afternoon...
Yes, probably Monday morning we can set this up.
Magnus seemed not to like the idea, though. I'd like to know why, Magnus...
There's NO REASON to think that we need to hurry this because of the New York Times article. Our current site will easily survive the load of that, especially after I finish speeding up the search engine (later this afternoon, cross your fingers).
Well, here's what I'm worried about:
(1) No huge deal, but...it's possible that the RecentChanges page is going to be, well, even huger than during the recent Slashdotting. That would suck, because it would be incredibly unwieldy and messy. But would that be a problem, other than that no one could possibly look at even a significant fraction of all that? (Which I myself argued isn't that huge of a problem, in a recent column...)
(2) Edit lock problems might increase if traffic increases radically. What can we do about this? It's still a reasonably serious problem right now--I have removed a half-dozen edit locks today.
(3) The search engine--Jimbo has got that handled, thanks.
(4) Isn't it possible that, with a lot of traffic, the whole website will just become unusably slow because it's based on text files? I am asking out of pure ignorance and blind fear, and need to be educated on this point. If we were using a database-driven website (and adequate server bandwidth, which won't be a problem), I'm assuming this *wouldn't* be a problem.
Larry