[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia scheduled downtime tonight

[Brion Vibber]

The English-language Wikipedia will be in read-only mode for maintenance
tonight/in the morning starting around 9pm PST (midnight EST; 5am GMT; 6am
most of Europe; the rest of you are on your own).

I'll be making some slight alterations to the database structure and
installing an updated version of the software to better support
client-side web caching for more browsers (so your browser will reload
pages only when they've actually changed instead of every time you visit
them). This will also enable a future update to do server-side caching
which should reduce server load significantly.

IE users, this should fix the cache bug where red links remain even after
a page has been created; the page should automatically reload with the
correct link status.

(This update has been running for about a week on meta.wikipedia.org and
test.wikipedia.org with no complaints so far.)

This will require taking the wiki "briefly" into read-only mode while
alterations are made. I don't know exactly how long it will take, but
don't be surprised if it takes about two hours. These things always take
longer than hoped. :)

The other languages will also be done around this time, but should go much
faster; there will be brief read-only outages, one at a time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)