Jimmy Wales wrote:
(However, I do suppose that if a particular nation or area is not well-connected to the new, a local squid would boost them a fair amount.)
The best possibility, technologically, to do what your potential donor wants to do, is to host a squid in your area, on an experimental basis perhaps, so that we can see if it makes a positive difference.
squid will help when there is more reading than writing .. for the Wikipedia.. for small Wikis, probably there is more writing than reading.. with editing and writing, squid won't have much effect I guess (unless I don't fully understand the purpose of squid)
At the same time, of course, I do recognize that donors care about what *they* care about, and frequently of course this would be their own language wikipedia. That's not a bad thing, it's only natural. And I don't want to discourage donors who want to help -- particularly not if the alternative is to have them fund a fork out of frustration.
If it is technically possible, and the funding cover all costs of it, it will be great to open such door, as Wikipedians will start to look for local donors who may be interested to support that language Wikipedia, and probably, this will help to make the "global" resources and donations more effective in terms of resource sharing.
THIS PART IS IMPORTANT -- $20,000 of new hardware is ordered and will be here within 2 week or so. This includes a more powerful database server with faster CPUs, faster hard drives. Our existing database server will still be here, so we will go from one strong machine to two strong machines.
Additionally, I've order 4 1U servers which will be adapted and customized for roles as apache's, squids, fileservers, whatever we need. I also hope that 1 or 2 of them will be sitting idle as "universal hot spares" so that we can quickly configure them to take on a role while we work on any other machines that are down.
I am no expert here, but in simple language, how much boost in the speed Wikipedia will have ? 10% ? 50% ? more ? and will those additions allow things like the "Search" to be enabled ? or "Search" is resource eating in a way that we will not see it back any time soon ?
Yours Isam Bayazidi