On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
This community relies heavily on volunteer input, and Brion asking for a patch is part of that.
I didn't see Brion's comment as a serious request for a patch. In fact, I'm not even sure if he thinks the idea is a good one in the first place (or that it's "an aesthetic change that would not have any considerable benefit whatsoever").
That particular change is a good idea, but not a high-priority fix (Wikipedia is broken, must be fixed immediately!) so I'm not necessarily going to jump on it that second.
There's currently no valid full history English Wikipedia database dump available. (There was a completed history dump on 20080103, but I seem to remember it not unzipping properly. If I'm wrong on that, maybe there has been one successful dump, but it's no longer available for download, except maybe on bittorrent.) I'd consider this pretty important. Obviously "Wikipedia is broken" would be more important, but I assume you mean broken technically and not socially in which case I'd say that doesn't seem to be the case.
Ordering the dumps so that failed ones get regenerated first is one step that might help mitigate this problem, but ultimately a redesign of the dump system is probably going to be required.
That's my view of the situation, for what it's worth (probably nothing).