[Wikipedia-l] Bugs? or Features?

[Guardian Tor]

Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote

> The technical discussion is taking place on wikitech-l at nupedia.com.
> This is a short summary and unofficial status report.
> 
> In the last few weeks, the Wikipedia webserver has been very slow,
> depending on new functions being added without enough concern about
> their performance under high load.
> 
> At 5 pm on Thursday May 9, Jimmy disabled some of the functions that
> consumed too much time, and there was an instant improvement in
> response time.  The removed functionality include the "talk" links.

Why didn't anyone tell us this? (If this was discussed somewhere, my appologies; I missed it). Several people have pointed out the missing Talk links, but this is the first time I've seen any explanation. I'm also concerned that this action was taken without general discussion. I personally consider the Talk pages to be vital in the everyday operation of the project, as they are used to work out disputes one what should be done with various articles.

BTW, the Talk links are still present in the Collogne Blue skin, and they can still be used by typing in the URL manually.

> The implementation is studied right now, and an improved version will
> probably be installed in the next few days.  At this point, I don't
> think more programmers are needed, but if you want to stay informed,
> you can join the wikitech-l to follow the reports and discussions.

I'm a worried that that software dicisions are becoming isolated from the main Wikipedia community. Before major changes and new features are implemented on the live Wikipedia server, there should be some kind of general discussion where everyone can come to an agreement. Wikitech-l is only of interest to the programmers; I would like such discussions to take place on the wiki itself.

> It is good to see that so many are concerned to have Wikipedia back in
> full operation, with all the necessary functionality.  However, it
> does surprise me that so few were complaining about the absurdly slow
> response times in the week before.

There were many complaints about the speed for the past couple weeks.

I don't mean any of this as a personal attack against the people working on the software and running the server. I really appreciate all the hard work you're putting in. I'm simply concerned that major software changes are being made without input from us non-programming Wikipedians.

-- Stephen Gilbert
-- 

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