subject: [Wikitech-l] en.wiki page counters

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:43:40AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > When were they re-enabled for en.wiki? Have they been fixed to generate more
> > meaningful data and minimize server load? They don't appear to tick for each
> > page reload so something is different.
>
> They're not re-enabled, I just forgot to disable the counter _display_
> code for en.wiki when I installed a bug fix in the skin code.

Speaking of this, I don't see why they can't be reenabled.  However,
instead of doing it in realtime (would which kill your performance), why
not do it at night?  Parse through the Apache log, compile a list of how
much each article counter needs to be incremented, connect to MySQL...
and do it.  :)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>):
>
> Say Lee, the last connexion to the french wiki was
> done at 11:21 am
> It was down from 11:21 to about a couple of minutes
> ago (that is 20:23)
> Between these two times  (so ... 9 hours...),
> absolutely NO connexions were possible
> I just checked ...was the same on the en apparently
>
> so....which traffic ? from where ? from who ? any idea

Well, that's the first time I'd heard that.  And there's
only one server: just because there's no traffic on one of
the many wikis doesn't mean the server isn't busy as hell.

The only message I got this morning was "the wiki is down".
That didn't tell me anything, so I logged on and saw that
the CPU load was maxed out, and that there were hundreds
of active connections. Looked like regular traffic to me.

It seems to be responding better now after the kick, but
I'm reluctant to restart the server (which involves breaking
all active connections) unless I get a more specific report
than "the wiki is down".

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 01:53:29PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>):
> >
> > Say Lee, the last connexion to the french wiki was
> > done at 11:21 am
> > It was down from 11:21 to about a couple of minutes
> > ago (that is 20:23)
> > Between these two times  (so ... 9 hours...),
> > absolutely NO connexions were possible
> > I just checked ...was the same on the en apparently
> >
> > so....which traffic ? from where ? from who ? any idea
>
> Well, that's the first time I'd heard that.  And there's
> only one server: just because there's no traffic on one of
> the many wikis doesn't mean the server isn't busy as hell.
>
> The only message I got this morning was "the wiki is down".
> That didn't tell me anything, so I logged on and saw that
> the CPU load was maxed out, and that there were hundreds
> of active connections. Looked like regular traffic to me.
>
> It seems to be responding better now after the kick, but
> I'm reluctant to restart the server (which involves breaking
> all active connections) unless I get a more specific report
> than "the wiki is down".

Well, hard to expect much more than that from a user who doesn't have a
login to the server itself.  By the way, my guess is that some query, or
perhaps some quirk, had caused MySQL to lock up.  All of the apache
processes were likely in a blocked state, waiting for MySQL to respond.
Just because there are lots of processes running, doesn't mean they're
actually responding.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Client-side caching updates

body:
> > Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > It's been checked in for a few days, and is running on
> > > http://test.wikipedia.org/ (which you can feel free to trash). I guess no
> > > one read my announcement from the other day. ;)

If it makes you feel better, I read your announcements.  I can't say
that refreshes seemed any faster, although they certainly didn't seem
any worse (it is hard to guage).  (Mozilla 1.3)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at sal-sun062.usc.edu>):
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > I just killed and restarted MySQL and Apache. Looks like we're
> > still getting slammed, and the logs don't show anything like an
> > out-of-control bot, so it looks like just ordinary heavy traffic.
>
> Lee, in the future when mysqld is doing its thang all too well; could you
> try connecting (mysql -u root -p) and running a 'SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST'?
> This should show the life-sucking query (somewhere among the big huge
> list), and it is often possible to kill just that query using mysql's
> KILL command.
>
> (Mysql supposedly always reserves one connection for root for emergency
> maintenance.)
>
> If you already tried that and it didn't work, please ignore. :)

Nope, didn't know about that one. Thanks, I'll file that one away
for future use.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] en.wiki page counters

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at sal-sun062.usc.edu>):
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Speaking of this, I don't see why they can't be reenabled.  However,
> > instead of doing it in realtime (would which kill your performance), why
> > not do it at night?  Parse through the Apache log, compile a list of how
> > much each article counter needs to be incremented, connect to MySQL...
> > and do it.  :)
>
> Because I don't care about the counters, and I'm still way behind schedule
> on things I think are important, like better caching and setting up
> additional languages on the new system, so I haven't gotten to it; and no
> one else has done it either.
>
> Here's what a line of the wiki's logfile looks like:
> 20030326195656  0000.175        /wiki/Styx
>   timestamp   response time        path
>
> Parsing is left as an exercise to the reader... :)

While we're at it, I added the wiki logfile just to get some
initial stats, but do we really need it anymore?  I'm sure Apache
is much more efficient at it, and it would eliminate a disk
access per page fetch.  The test suite can be used to get timing
info now.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at sal-sun062.usc.edu>):
>
> It's been checked in for a few days, and is running on
> http://test.wikipedia.org/ (which you can feel free to trash). I guess no
> one read my announcement from the other day. ;)

For some reason it doesn't have some of my recent code updates, so the
test suite won't run against it (in particular I added name attributes
to all the HTML forms so the test suite could find them).

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] can non-English Wikipedias move to another server?

body:
> (Chuck Smith <msochuck at yahoo.com>):
> Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be
> on a seperate server than the English one, so we
> wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive
> English-language traffic killing us?

No reason at all, other than having someone buy us another server.
I'm sure it will happen eventually.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] Skins

body:
Speaking of skins, I've been hoping for a stylesheet that is more
suitable for the 'advanced' user - something that makes it easy to do
things as quick and efficiently as possible.

I've created a full finished page, and put it out on my webserver.  All
of the CSS is in this one file (instead of linking against the standard
CSS file, which I can't edit.)

Here are some notes, but I got tired of writing them down after a while:

1) a.stub has identical elements in both the HTML and the external CSS file. [removed one]
2) #quickbar a.new is broken (CC2200 should be #CC2200) [fixed]
3) JabbaSkript is removed.
4) CSS is in alphabetical order (tons easier to read and much clearer).
5) Removed the pull-down and Go button from topbar.
6) Removed bgcolor from <body>
7) Removed Main Page, Recent changes, Edit this page, and Older versions from the topbar.
8) Removed the <p> under "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
9) Removed Wikipedia logo.
10) Abolished 'article' CSS section (the article is the content, isn't it?)
11) Moved 'footer' out of 'content' section.
...

Anyways, here is where you can take a look:
Original: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
Revamped: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html

It uses CSS2 heavily, and so it probably won't render in any
non-compliant browser (which is fine for 'alternative' skins, I hear).

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


body:
> > For some reason it doesn't have some of my recent code updates, so the
> > test suite won't run against it (in particular I added name attributes
> > to all the HTML forms so the test suite could find them).
>
> How about now?

That's better. I'll try running the suite again after lunch.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to qualify a title

body:
> I propose we use the form [[Slogan: . . . ]]

I thought we decided to do [[Slogan '{slogan text}']]
so it doesn't confuse people with [[Wikipedia:
{something}]] or [[Special: {something}]].  On the
naming policy for slogans page, there only is [[...
(slogan)]] and [[Slogan ' ... "]]

-- LittleDan

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!
http://platinum.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>):
>
> select l.cur_title, r.cur_title from cur l inner join
> links lnk on  binary l.cur_title = binary lnk.l_from
> inner join cur r on binary    r.cur_title = binary
> lnk.l_to where r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'

"where ... like '%..." is a no-no, especially on a
join, as it will cause a full search of every record.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 12:54:03PM -0800, Anthere wrote:
>
> --- Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 01:53:29PM -0600, Lee Daniel
> > Crocker wrote:
> > > > (Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>):
> > > >
> > > > Say Lee, the last connexion to the french wiki
> > was
> > > > done at 11:21 am
> > > > It was down from 11:21 to about a couple of
> > minutes
> > > > ago (that is 20:23)
> > > > Between these two times  (so ... 9 hours...),
> > > > absolutely NO connexions were possible
> > > > I just checked ...was the same on the en
> > apparently
> > > >
> > > > so....which traffic ? from where ? from who ?
> > any idea
> > >
> > > Well, that's the first time I'd heard that.  And
> > there's
> > > only one server: just because there's no traffic
> > on one of
> > > the many wikis doesn't mean the server isn't busy
> > as hell.
> > >
> > > The only message I got this morning was "the wiki
> > is down".
> > > That didn't tell me anything, so I logged on and
> > saw that
> > > the CPU load was maxed out, and that there were
> > hundreds
> > > of active connections. Looked like regular traffic
> > to me.
>
> I dunno Lee
> The wiki has been horribly slow for the past 2 weeks,
> and many editors have already gave up editing because
> of this
> Today, it was just as if wiki didnot existed at all
> during 9 hours, which were full day hours
> And not only was there no response from the server at
> all, but no response on the mailing list either. That
> is a bit disturbing I would say.
> In short, if 13/14 days it takes about 1 mn to respond
> for each page during day time, and the 14th day wiki
> doesnot exist at all, well, it won't be long for
> anybody to just give up
>
> Besides, I checked on the english wiki, and I saw
> there were no edits in the recent changes log for many
> hours, so you can hardly say it is no response from
> "one of the numerous wiki". This was a general matter.
> So, we wonder.
>
> > > It seems to be responding better now after the
> > kick, but
> > > I'm reluctant to restart the server (which
> > involves breaking
> > > all active connections) unless I get a more
> > specific report
> > > than "the wiki is down".
> >
> > Well, hard to expect much more than that from a user
> > who doesn't have a
> > login to the server itself.  By the way, my guess is
> > that some query, or
> > perhaps some quirk, had caused MySQL to lock up.
> > All of the apache
> > processes were likely in a blocked state, waiting
> > for MySQL to respond.
> > Just because there are lots of processes running,
> > doesn't mean they're
> > actually responding.
> >
> > --
> > Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 --
> > Minneapolis, MN
>
> Nick, did you read that message I forwarded several
> hours ago from Ryo ? I was on my old email address
> when I did the forward, and the wikitech list refused
> it (the weird thing is that I just checked pending
> request, and there are none, so I don't know where
> that mail actually is:-)). But it got accepted on the
> main list.
>
> In short, Ryo reported he made a query around 11 am.
> Just after that query, there were no answer from the
> server for about 5 mn. Shortly after the server
> finally answered, he made another one, and immediately
> after he made that query, the server stopped
> answering...for about 9 hours
>
> these are the queries he made
>
> select l.cur_title, r.cur_title from cur l inner join
> links lnk on  binary l.cur_title = binary lnk.l_from
> inner join cur r on binary    r.cur_title = binary
> lnk.l_to where r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'
>
> then simply
>
> select count( * ) from links
>
> could this be an explanation ?
> or not ?

No, I didn't get the email.  As far as I know, it didn't make it to the
list.  I'm guessing that maybe he pushed the machine beyond what it
could handle, and perhaps MySQL just shat all over itself.  To be fair,
it is hard to expect any software to run perfectly under low resource
situations.  Perhaps an upgrade to a later kernel might help, but really
the problem is somebody using too much of a finite resource.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: legal liability issues

body:
According to the constitution of the united states,
libel   should be solved out of the courts simply by
notifying everyone of the incorrect information.
Then, supposedly, the case is settled (although there
is no legal mechanism for this).  If legaly
significant libelous content is found, we could notify
all of the users (by email) who viewed it and change
the content.  If we recieved a notice that we were to
be sued, a notice could be put on the front page
notifying everyone of the falsness of the content in
addition to what I said above. We should probably also
put some sort of legal disclaimer on the front page.
Could you get the lawyer to write one for you?

--- Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net>
wrote:
> Hi, all. I've been corresponding with an attorney
> about some issues
> pertaining to the Disinfopedia. He has some concern
> about whether we
> might be legally liable for its content.
> Specifically, could we be
> sued for libel or slander if someone posts false
> information there

...

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!
http://platinum.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 03:00:43PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>):
> >
> > select l.cur_title, r.cur_title from cur l inner join
> > links lnk on  binary l.cur_title = binary lnk.l_from
> > inner join cur r on binary    r.cur_title = binary
> > lnk.l_to where r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'
>
> "where ... like '%..." is a no-no, especially on a
> join, as it will cause a full search of every record.

Note that if we were running PostgreSQL, we could set timeout limits on
a per user basis.  :P

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 01:18:08PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Note that if we were running PostgreSQL, we could set timeout limits on
> > a per user basis.  :P
>
> Note that if someone wants us to run PostgreSQL, they should put their
> code where their mouth is and adapt the software to run with it. :)

Well, if I had a machine beefy enough to run a copy of the en Wikipedia,
I'd be happy to do so.  Has the second box come in?  Maybe we can throw
it on both, and have a little bakeoff?

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> http://test.wikipedia.com/ passes the current incarnation of
> the test suite (which is admittedly incomplete, but it will
> certainly catch anything obvious--and it does make edits and
> then check for them, which a broken caching system might fail).

Hmm, looks like your test suite doesn't send any If-Modified-Since headers
when refetching previously visited pages, so it wouldn't trigger a 304 Not
Modified response under any circumstances.

(The logfile should now pop out a debug statement to this effect.)

What are you using to handle the http connections?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Note that if we were running PostgreSQL, we could set timeout limits on
> > a per user basis.  :P
>
> Note that if someone wants us to run PostgreSQL, they should put their
> code where their mouth is and adapt the software to run with it. :)

As I said earlier, MySQL 4.0.12 is the first thing I want to
experiment with; Postgres might well be the second, and I already
isolated all the MySQL-isms of the code into one place so it
shouldn't be too hard to adapt.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 01:18:08PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > > Note that if we were running PostgreSQL, we could set timeout limits on
> > > a per user basis.  :P
> >
> > Note that if someone wants us to run PostgreSQL, they should put their
> > code where their mouth is and adapt the software to run with it. :)
>
> Well, if I had a machine beefy enough to run a copy of the en Wikipedia,
> I'd be happy to do so.  Has the second box come in?  Maybe we can throw
> it on both, and have a little bakeoff?

It doesn't take much. My test setup at home is old Compaq with
a 400Mhz K6 and an 8Gb drive.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:40:01PM +0100, Thomas Corell wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
>
> >Note that if someone wants us to run PostgreSQL, they should put their
> >code where their mouth is and adapt the software to run with it. :)
> >
>
> Adapting the software IMHO is not the main problem, what about all those
>   sysop's depending on e.g. mysql syntax? And I think there are more
> open questions.
> But soon after getting the latex conversion at work, I start testing if
> I can gamble with wikipedia at home, and this requires wikipedia to run
> on postgresql - no way using mysql on my home system ;)

I don't think the syntax is that radically different.  Most of what
people do are simple SELECTS which should be pretty much the same across
every database, ever.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to
	qualify a title

body:
On 3/26/03 3:27 PM, "james duffy" <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> The Cunctator has begun renaming the articles on slogans to remove the form
> [[Slogan: . . . ]] which had been used by general agreement. However he
> argued that no compromise was likely therefore he went and began renaming
> everything unilaterally. So we need to find some sort of agreement rather
> than have  The Cunctator unilaterally deciding wiki policy. Otherwise we
> will have endless endless renaming wars.

I'm quite the unilateralist, aren't I? Anyway, this whole issue is being
discussed at [[Talk:Slogan]] without the ad hominem tone; anyone who wants
to weigh in on the particulars of the merits of one idea or another should
certainly weigh in there. Not to discourage the mailing list, but there's
little point in rehashing issues on multiple fora.

Though Jtdirl seems to have made the (dare I say it) unilateral decision
that this issue can only be discussed on wikien-l.

He should also note that I have made no attempt to change the AKFD article's
current name [[slogan 'AIDS Kills Fags Dead']] even though I think it
shouldn't be in that form. I'm waiting until a consensus forms to make any
changes (or make no change, as the case may be).


subject: [Wikitech-l] generating HTML - maybe stupid question

body:
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, tarquin wrote:
> do we generate the HTML from Wiki code every single time a page is viewed?

Presently yes, unless your browser caches it on your end.

To do caching on the server, we have to finish working out issues of
changes made to the html output by variations in user preferences (some
things, like the TeX html/image/mathml? options, will perforce alter the
output; others can be relegated more to the stylesheets than they are now)
and whether we can also cache the whole thing including the template.

The fastest thing would be to have a complete, ready-to-send page as a
file which we can spit right out upon determining that the requested page
is cached and the user isn't using funny options. Putting username/ip addr
in the corner, having a page counter, and having different sidebar links
available for anon and logged-in users complicates all this.

Another thing; on phase 2, we had problems with the caching code wherein
some things that were determined from parsing the page (interlanguage
links and link keywords for a meta tag) got dropped when viewing the page
cached. These either need to be pre-cached too, or need to be separately
fetchable. (For instance, magnus's experimental code with a separate
table. This needs to get finished and put in place!)

See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_strategy

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: legal liability issues

body:
"According to the constitution of the united states,
libel   should be solved out of the courts simply by
notifying everyone of the incorrect information."

Oh, really?  Which article would that be?

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of Daniel Ehrenberg
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 15:13
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: legal liability issues

According to the constitution of the united states,
libel   should be solved out of the courts simply by
notifying everyone of the incorrect information.
Then, supposedly, the case is settled (although there
is no legal mechanism for this).  If legaly
significant libelous content is found, we could notify
all of the users (by email) who viewed it and change
the content.  If we recieved a notice that we were to
be sued, a notice could be put on the front page
notifying everyone of the falsness of the content in
addition to what I said above. We should probably also
put some sort of legal disclaimer on the front page.
Could you get the lawyer to write one for you?

--- Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net>
wrote:
> Hi, all. I've been corresponding with an attorney
> about some issues
> pertaining to the Disinfopedia. He has some concern
> about whether we
> might be legally liable for its content.
> Specifically, could we be
> sued for libel or slander if someone posts false
> information there

...

__________________________________________________
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body:
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, I scribbled hastily:
> Another thing; on phase 2, we had problems with the caching code wherein
> some things that were determined from parsing the page (interlanguage
> links and link keywords for a meta tag) got dropped when viewing the page
> cached.

To clarify: phase 2 cached the html output of the wikitext, but not the
surrounding template/skin, so page-specific things that fell into that
outside (uncached) area but required data gotten from parsing weren't
available.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
http://test.wikipedia.com/ passes the current incarnation of
the test suite (which is admittedly incomplete, but it will
certainly catch anything obvious--and it does make edits and
then check for them, which a broken caching system might fail).

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Location of policy discussion (was: Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to qualify a title)

body:
There's no hard and fast rule on WHERE a discussion on
WikiPolicy has to be carried on. Indeed, it would hardly
make sense to IGNORE discussion in one realm of the
WikiKingdom simply because one felt the discussion
really ought to be in another realm. (Not naming any
names, or is that another one of those Roman pro-
lipstick rhetorical tricks?)

Zoe, Jtdirl and some others have weighed in on the issue
-- on various talk pages, as well as here on the mailing
list -- and it wouldn't be surprising if any of them
felt irked at having been ignored.

<slang style=surfer>
Dude! Like the whole reason we have this splendid
mailing list thing is, like, so we don't go surfing
alone! There's, like, hazards out there: shoals, sharks,
and sharp rocks, so we all gotta stick together, man!
</slang>

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Thomas Corell <T.Corell at t-online.de>):
> But, I will start porting the tables as soon I found some spare time.
> Lee, is there a loctation where I can get these mysql statements you
> isolated?

All database access in the system should go through the functions
in DatabaseFunctions.php.  The only one that might be tricky to
implement is wfInsertID(), which currently depends on a MySQL
extension for auto-increment fields.  But most databases have some
similar feature.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to qualify a title

body:
And Jimmy, you were saying that Cunctator was excessively interested in consensus?
Zoe
 james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:
The Cunctator has begun renaming the articles on slogans to remove the form
[[Slogan: . . . ]] which had been used by general agreement. However he
argued that no compromise was likely therefore he went and began renaming
everything unilaterally. So we need to find some sort of agreement rather
than have The Cunctator unilaterally deciding wiki policy. Otherwise we
will have endless endless renaming wars.

I propose we use the form [[Slogan: . . . ]] rather than the alternative [[
. . . (slogan)]].

1. Some people complained about how we don't say [[Book: . . . ]] or [[Film:
. . . ]] and that therefore putting in slogan was wrong. I disagree. A
slogan is by definition POV. Used without qualification, particularly if the
slogan is politically controversial, rascist, homophobic, or derogatory to
some people's religious, ethnic of cultural origins, can cause offence or
appear to be endorsing the POV in the slogan. The use of the word slogan in
the title is necessary to distance wiki from the slogan message as it would
appear on the list or on google. Doing that would NPOV it by drawing
attention to the fact that we are merely repeating a slogan, not expressing
one.

2. Putting it in brackets at the end of the line could cause problems if a
slogan is long, for the '(slogan)' might not appear on goggle, if the end of
a long line was cut off. Instead people simply see a POV slogan coming from
wikipedia.

3. Putting '(slogan)' at the end means that people would be greeted with a
potentially POV slogan, with which they might have a strong positive or
negative reaction - prior to reaching the end of the line (if they see it at
all) where it is neutralised by the word slogan. Putting the word slogan in
first means that before they even read the slogan they know it is a slogan
and is featuring on wiki as a slogan, not POV propaganda. The very first
word people read in an article title is the first word. Not everyone reads
the full title, particularly if it is a long title. So the key NPOVing word
'slogan' should be where everyone can will and can see it, at the first.

4. Grammatically, having it at the front of the line makes more sense. For
example, [[Slogan: AIDS Kills Fags Dead]] in effect reads, 'the slogan: AIDS
Kills Fags Dead'. Putting it at the end effectively reads 'AIDS Kills Fags
Dead - which is a slogan' As I said above, people may have a very strong
reaction to that particular slogan. Using the 'slogan' word upfront NPOVs
the statement by contextualising it as a slogan, not an expression of a POV.
Put at the end, people may well have had an emotional POV reaction (for or
against) before they reach the word slogan at the end, if they even notice
it.

5. Using both forms (as The Cunctator seems to want) seems unnecessarily
complicated. It makes logical sense to use one standard template, not two
because using two (with [[Slogan: . . .]] being used for controversial
slogans poses the question: who decides if a slogan is controversial
enough? Some people might see a slogan as sufficiently NPOV enough to use
'(slogan)' at the end. Others might disagree and the result would be an
edit/renaming war. Having one template means that no-one has to form a value
judgment on whether it is or is not controversial. If it is a slogan, the
one universal format is used.

We do need to have some sort of consensus agreement on this issue set out
clearly. The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by
his unilateral action. It would help the situation enormously if we had
clear agreement on the form, which could then be entered as a naming
convention to which people could refer, rather than producing constant rows
over slogans today, tomorrow, next month, six months down the line, etc.

Any opinions?

JT

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan toqualify a title

body:
I moved the wiki-based discussion to:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_policy_for_slogans

I suggest that someone refactor that page to reflect all the
different proposals that have been made here on the mailing
list, as well as on scattered talk pages.

Then, as we did with the great Country Reorganization
Discussion, I suggest that each Wikipedian indicate their
preferences. This is _similar_ to voting, except you can voice
your approval or disapproval any way you want.

One way that worked well with the country reorganization, was
for people to "sign" their usernames (with three tildes ~~~) by
_each_ proposal they favored.

Ed Poor


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] City names argument resurrected

body:
Jimmy Wales said:

>A horse! A horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Oh, no hang on, that was Richard III. ;) He actually said:

>(Tim accidentally attributed some remarks to me that were actually
>made by Ed Poor.  No big problem, I just note it in case it comes up
>in the future!)

Sorry.

I'm also sorry that I missed Eclecticology's post (Tue, 25 Mar 2003 08:40:45
-0800) last time. I will reply to it now:

>I object because it takes these Australian city names as though they were
>the only uses of those names.  There was certainly a well-lnown military
>aircraft called the Canberra.  Perth is also a significant city in
>Scotland.  Sydney, Nova Scotia was at least big enough for an English
>travel agent to mistakenly send a young honeymooning couple there a year or
>two ago.

The decision to implement "primary topic" disambiguation is made all the
time around Wikipedia. Will you also be arguing for [[Cream]] to be moved to
[[Cream (dairy product)]]?

There may a plane called "Canberra", but it's not in Wikipedia at the
moment, so it's obviously not *that* well known. However, if we later
discover "Canberra" has an important meaning other than the city name, we
can move the article at that point. There is no need to pre-emptively
disambiguate since moving an article and changing all references is a
relatively simple task. Preemptive disambiguation has the disadvantage that
it requires people to write [[Canberra, Australia|Canberra]], even though
the chance [[Canberra]] will some day become a disambiguation page rather
than a redirect is fairly small.

I'm not suggesting that all Australian cities should have a simple name. The
decision whether to use primary-topic disambiguation or some other more
neutral form should be made on a case-by-case basis. Perth is a good example
of a page which should probably stay as it is (although the Australian Perth
has 30 times more population than the other two combined).

Now back to Mr Wales (at least I think it was him):

:I think we should do the same thing for all countries, or at least all
:English speaking countries, or for all cities that meet some popular
:recognition threshold, whatever that may be.

I don't think "popular recognition threshold" should enter into the
*preemptive* disambiguation decision. The one horse town Ebor currently has
the simple name, and I think it should stay that way for now. If another
Ebor becomes evident, the town can be moved, but that's no big deal. We
don't preemptively disambiguate albums, books or movies, so why do it for
(non-American) towns and cities?

Also, doing the same thing for all countries would mean using [[City,
State]] convention, i.e. [[Canberra, Australian Capital Territory]] or
[[Perth, Western Australia]]. I don't think anyone wants that.

Preemptive disambiguation is necessary for American towns and cities because
the chance of a name being ambiguous is very much higher. Also, even
contributors naive in the ways of the 'pedia have a fair chance of typing
[[City, State]] because that's the way it's usually done.

I think my position and Mav's are basically identical. He said:

]Summary: In general there is no special naming convention for cities but
when
]there is a reasonable ambiguity then and /only/ then do we add additional
]distinguishing information to the title.

]The only exceptions are the United States and Canada where nearly every
city
]name is used multiple times within their respective borders /and/ many
others
]are shared between them (there are several Richmonds in Canada and a couple
]dozen in the United States, for example). So cities in these nations are to
]be pre-emptively disambiguated because city naming in the United States and
]Canada is /so/ ambiguous /and/ these cites are very often expressed in the
][city/plane name, state/province] format ("Richmond, California" or
]"Richmond, Ontario").

How does this "payment for post" thing work? Can I use my 983 edits to date
as a kind of bank? ;)

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 08:46:32AM -0600, Nick Reinking wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 06:17:13AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
> > I don't know what ssh means...
> >
> > Slow Server Help ?
> > Silence ! Sleeping Happily ?
> > System Severily Hurt ?

Secure SHell

> > Anyway, if the server is down, nothing special to say.
> > If the server is just slow, I would just say that no
> > connexions have been possible for the past two hours.

Server is not down, only HTTP doesn't respond.

> Somebody is going to have to give mysqld a kill (maybe a kill -9).
> Anybody got root on the box?

$ uname -a
Linux www.wikipedia.org 2.4.7-10smp #1 SMP Thu Sep 6 16:16:16 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
$

Should I try this ptrace() trick now ;-) ?
Just kidding ...


body:
> I thought we decided to do [[Slogan '{slogan text}']]
> so it doesn't confuse people with [[Wikipedia:
> {something}]] or [[Special: {something}]].  On the
> naming policy for slogans page, there only is [[...
> (slogan)]] and [[Slogan ' ... "]]
>
> -- LittleDan

No, actually "we" never decided anything at all.

And, like it or not, the discussion has moved to

  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_policy_for_slogans

... so please browse over and make your light sabre felt, young Jedi!

Uncle Ed


body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> Hmm, looks like your test suite doesn't send any If-Modified-Since headers
> when refetching previously visited pages, so it wouldn't trigger a 304 Not
> Modified response under any circumstances.
>
> (The logfile should now pop out a debug statement to this effect.)
> What are you using to handle the http connections?

The virtual "browser" is a Java class from the "httpunit" package.
It can be configured in different ways--I'll look into caching
behavior.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


body:
Tarky-dude! Chill! Just surf over to

  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(slogans)

and check out the excellently laid-out refactoring job that Martin and Cunc did!

Far out, man!!

Surfer Dude (can't keep a good man down)


body:
On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 18:32, tarquin wrote:
> james duffy wrote:
> > The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by his
> > unilateral action.
>
> Cunc has been doing stuff like this for a while -- reverting moves of
> Sep11 casualties after there was a consensus to move them to the
> memorial wiki.

A consensus in which I had not been involved, and an issue which was
handled with equanimity and lack of finger-pointing or blaming by Martin
and myself.


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Thomas Corell <T.Corell at t-online.de>):
>
> Ok, I will try to understand what is the extention they made, first look
> at the function in the mysql docs did not give me a hint. Possibly I
> miss at midnight the reason why I need to know this number and what
> extention is handled with it. But currval(seq-name) must be similar.

The MySQL extension is the availability of auto-increment integer
fields. They're handy when you need an integer key value that's
guaranteed to be unique, but you don't care what it is. Without the
extension, you can do that by keeping a "last used ID" filed value
in a separate table and updating it every time you insert. But with
MySQL, you just go ahead and do the insert, and then ask it "Oh,
by the way, what integer value did you just assign to the auto-
increment field of the record I just inserted?"

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia unscheduled downtime over

body:
At 10:41 PM 3/26/03 +0100, Smurf wrote:
>Anthere wrote:
>
>>The server is female ?
>
>Of course, as you seen today you have to handle she very carefuly and
>tenderly like a wife.
>
>Smurf

Husbands take just as much careful handling as wives--both are human
and therefore fragile, after all.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: james duffy

body:
The Cunctator has begun renaming the articles on slogans to remove the form
[[Slogan: . . . ]] which had been used by general agreement. However he
argued that no compromise was likely therefore he went and began renaming
everything unilaterally. So we need to find some sort of agreement rather
than have  The Cunctator unilaterally deciding wiki policy. Otherwise we
will have endless endless renaming wars.

I propose we use the form [[Slogan: . . . ]] rather than the alternative [[
. . . (slogan)]].

1. Some people complained about how we don't say [[Book: . . . ]] or [[Film:
. . . ]] and that therefore putting in slogan was wrong. I disagree. A
slogan is by definition POV. Used without qualification, particularly if the
slogan is politically controversial, rascist, homophobic, or derogatory to
some people's religious, ethnic of cultural origins, can cause offence or
appear to be endorsing the POV in the slogan. The use of the word slogan in
the title is necessary to distance wiki from the slogan message as it would
appear on the list or on google. Doing that would NPOV it by drawing
attention to the fact that we are merely repeating a slogan, not expressing
one.

2. Putting it in brackets at the end of the line could cause problems if a
slogan is long, for the '(slogan)' might not appear on goggle, if the end of
a long line was cut off. Instead people simply see a POV slogan coming from
wikipedia.

3. Putting '(slogan)' at the end means that people would be greeted with a
potentially POV slogan, with which they might have a strong positive or
negative reaction - prior to reaching the end of the line (if they see it at
all) where it is neutralised by the word slogan. Putting the word slogan in
first means that before they even read the slogan they know it is a slogan
and is featuring on wiki as a slogan, not POV propaganda. The very first
word people read in an article title is the first word. Not everyone reads
the full title, particularly if it is a long title. So the key NPOVing word
'slogan' should be where everyone can will and can see it, at the first.

4. Grammatically, having it at the front of the line makes more sense. For
example, [[Slogan: AIDS Kills Fags Dead]] in effect reads, 'the slogan: AIDS
Kills Fags Dead'. Putting it at the end effectively reads 'AIDS Kills Fags
Dead - which is a slogan' As I said above, people may have a very strong
reaction to that particular slogan. Using the 'slogan' word upfront NPOVs
the statement by contextualising it as a slogan, not an expression of a POV.
Put at the end, people may well have had an emotional POV reaction (for or
against) before they reach the word slogan at the end, if they even notice
it.

5. Using both forms (as The Cunctator seems to want) seems unnecessarily
complicated. It makes logical sense to use one standard template, not two
because using two (with [[Slogan: . . .]] being used for controversial
slogans poses the question:  who decides if a slogan is controversial
enough? Some people might see a slogan as sufficiently NPOV enough to use
'(slogan)' at the end. Others might disagree and the result would be an
edit/renaming war. Having one template means that no-one has to form a value
judgment on whether it is or is not controversial. If it is a slogan, the
one universal format is used.

We do need to have some sort of consensus agreement on this issue set out
clearly. The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by
his unilateral action. It would help the situation enormously if we had
clear agreement on the form, which could then be entered as a naming
convention to which people could refer, rather than producing constant rows
over slogans today, tomorrow, next month, six months down the line, etc.

Any opinions?

JT

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I just don't like the usage at all. It's a sneaky way to put dirty stuff on
Wikipedia.

Fred

> From: "james duffy" <jtdirl at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 20:27:34 +0000
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to qualify a
> title
>
>
> The Cunctator has begun renaming the articles on slogans to remove the form
> [[Slogan: . . . ]] which had been used by general agreement. However he
> argued that no compromise was likely therefore he went and began renaming
> everything unilaterally. So we need to find some sort of agreement rather
> than have  The Cunctator unilaterally deciding wiki policy. Otherwise we
> will have endless endless renaming wars.
>
> I propose we use the form [[Slogan: . . . ]] rather than the alternative [[
> . . . (slogan)]].
>
> 1. Some people complained about how we don't say [[Book: . . . ]] or [[Film:
> . . . ]] and that therefore putting in slogan was wrong. I disagree. A
> slogan is by definition POV. Used without qualification, particularly if the
> slogan is politically controversial, rascist, homophobic, or derogatory to
> some people's religious, ethnic of cultural origins, can cause offence or
> appear to be endorsing the POV in the slogan. The use of the word slogan in
> the title is necessary to distance wiki from the slogan message as it would
> appear on the list or on google. Doing that would NPOV it by drawing
> attention to the fact that we are merely repeating a slogan, not expressing
> one.
>
> 2. Putting it in brackets at the end of the line could cause problems if a
> slogan is long, for the '(slogan)' might not appear on goggle, if the end of
> a long line was cut off. Instead people simply see a POV slogan coming from
> wikipedia.
>
> 3. Putting '(slogan)' at the end means that people would be greeted with a
> potentially POV slogan, with which they might have a strong positive or
> negative reaction - prior to reaching the end of the line (if they see it at
> all) where it is neutralised by the word slogan. Putting the word slogan in
> first means that before they even read the slogan they know it is a slogan
> and is featuring on wiki as a slogan, not POV propaganda. The very first
> word people read in an article title is the first word. Not everyone reads
> the full title, particularly if it is a long title. So the key NPOVing word
> 'slogan' should be where everyone can will and can see it, at the first.
>
> 4. Grammatically, having it at the front of the line makes more sense. For
> example, [[Slogan: AIDS Kills Fags Dead]] in effect reads, 'the slogan: AIDS
> Kills Fags Dead'. Putting it at the end effectively reads 'AIDS Kills Fags
> Dead - which is a slogan' As I said above, people may have a very strong
> reaction to that particular slogan. Using the 'slogan' word upfront NPOVs
> the statement by contextualising it as a slogan, not an expression of a POV.
> Put at the end, people may well have had an emotional POV reaction (for or
> against) before they reach the word slogan at the end, if they even notice
> it.
>
> 5. Using both forms (as The Cunctator seems to want) seems unnecessarily
> complicated. It makes logical sense to use one standard template, not two
> because using two (with [[Slogan: . . .]] being used for controversial
> slogans poses the question:  who decides if a slogan is controversial
> enough? Some people might see a slogan as sufficiently NPOV enough to use
> '(slogan)' at the end. Others might disagree and the result would be an
> edit/renaming war. Having one template means that no-one has to form a value
> judgment on whether it is or is not controversial. If it is a slogan, the
> one universal format is used.
>
> We do need to have some sort of consensus agreement on this issue set out
> clearly. The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by
> his unilateral action. It would help the situation enormously if we had
> clear agreement on the form, which could then be entered as a naming
> convention to which people could refer, rather than producing constant rows
> over slogans today, tomorrow, next month, six months down the line, etc.
>
> Any opinions?
>
> JT
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] It's all about the Pentiums Baby! (was RE: can non-English Wikipedias move to another server?)

body:
>Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be
>on a seperate server than the English one, so we
>wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive
>English-language traffic killing us?
>
>Chuck

But the current slowdown was caused by a fr.wiki sysop running a, uh, less
than optimized sql command. ;-) If there were such a separation then only
en.wiki would have been up during that time and we would probably have a
flood of angry emails in a variety of languages complaining about being
"singled-out". It is far better to keep the databases together, have the
webserver on its own powerful box, and then have the mailing lists on a
cheapo 500 MHz Linux box (which I can borg together and donate if needed -
but I'm sure somebody else could donate an even better box).

Another server is going to be up soon but this is only a short term solution
given how fast we are growing. Mid to long term we need to set-up the
Wikimedia Foundation so that we'll have a legal entity to accept
tax-deductable donations and receive grants.

Then we can start to build a really fast server cluster with 1GB Ethernet and
if needed even start to pay Jimbo his cost for bandwidth. I hear bandwidth is
pretty cheap for ISPs who buy it in bulk (like Jimbo) but is kinda expensive
for ISP customers - the last thing we want is to be just another ISP customer
so we shouldn't expect Jimbo to pay all our bills in full forever (we need to
prevent taking Jimbo for granted - paying him back his monthly out-of-pocket
cost only seems fair once we have the money to do so). But if he insists on
providing unlimited bandwidth to us for free indefinitely we shouldn't
complain about that either. ;-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 20]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] It's all about the Pentiums Baby! (was RE: can non-English Wikipedias move to another server?)

body:
Opps! I sent this message to WikiEN-l by mistake. Sorry.

>Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be
>on a seperate server than the English one, so we
>wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive
>English-language traffic killing us?
>
>Chuck

But the current slowdown was caused by a fr.wiki sysop running a, uh, less
than optimized sql command. ;-) If there were such a separation then only
en.wiki would have been up during that time and we would probably have a
flood of angry emails in a variety of languages complaining about being
"singled-out". It is far better to keep the databases together, have the
webserver on its own powerful box, and then have the mailing lists on a
cheapo 500 MHz Linux box (which I can borg together and donate if needed -
but I'm sure somebody else could donate an even better box).

Another server is going to be up soon but this is only a short term solution
given how fast we are growing. Mid to long term we need to set-up the
Wikimedia Foundation so that we'll have a legal entity to accept
tax-deductable donations and receive grants.

Then we can start to build a really fast server cluster with 1GB Ethernet and
if needed even start to pay Jimbo his cost for bandwidth. I hear bandwidth is
pretty cheap for ISPs who buy it in bulk (like Jimbo) but is kinda expensive
for ISP customers - the last thing we want is to be just another ISP customer
so we shouldn't expect Jimbo to pay all our bills in full forever (we need to
prevent taking Jimbo for granted - paying him back his monthly out-of-pocket
cost only seems fair once we have the money to do so). But if he insists on
providing unlimited bandwidth to us for free indefinitely we shouldn't
complain about that either. ;-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 20]]


from_name: Thomas Corell

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> It's been checked in for a few days, and is running on
> http://test.wikipedia.org/ (which you can feel free to trash). I guess no
> one read my announcement from the other day. ;)

I'm not good at testing chaching. Din't you wrote meta.wikipedia.org
yesterday?

Nobody
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Chuck Smith

body:
Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be
on a seperate server than the English one, so we
wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive
English-language traffic killing us?

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en fran?ais !
Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:
> Well, hard to expect much more than that from a user who doesn't have a
> login to the server itself.

Well, that's right.

> By the way, my guess is that some query, or
> perhaps some quirk, had caused MySQL to lock up.  All of the apache
> processes were likely in a blocked state, waiting for MySQL to respond.
> Just because there are lots of processes running, doesn't mean they're
> actually responding.

One reason I like DB's I can attach an strace at each query. No better
way to get these buggers ;)

Nobody^H^H^H^H^H^HSmurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:

> Note that if someone wants us to run PostgreSQL, they should put their
> code where their mouth is and adapt the software to run with it. :)
>

Adapting the software IMHO is not the main problem, what about all those
   sysop's depending on e.g. mysql syntax? And I think there are more
open questions.
But soon after getting the latex conversion at work, I start testing if
I can gamble with wikipedia at home, and this requires wikipedia to run
on postgresql - no way using mysql on my home system ;)

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


body:
Anthere wrote:

> The server is female ?

Of course, as you seen today you have to handle she very carefuly and
tenderly like a wife.

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Skins

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:55:56 -0600, Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Anyways, here is where you can take a look:
>> Original: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
>> Revamped: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html
>>
>> It uses CSS2 heavily, and so it probably won't render in any
>> non-compliant browser (which is fine for 'alternative' skins, I hear).
>>
> Nice, but your fixed div at the top is too short for my default font
> size, so the text is truncated. You probably need to set the div
> height in ems.

Yup.
And have you applied styling to the form buttons? I think it's best to
let the browser supply the user's OS default widgets, so they *look*
like things that perform actions.
I miss the wikipedia logo too :(

>
>
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to qualify
 a title

body:
james duffy wrote:

>
>
> 1. Some people complained about how we don't say [[Book: . . . ]] or
> [[Film: . . . ]] and that therefore putting in slogan was wrong. I
> disagree. A slogan is by definition POV.

So if someone writes a novel called "Death to all fags", that's fine as
an article title? Hmm.... don't mind me, just playing devil's advocate :-)

> The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by his
> unilateral action.

Cunc has been doing stuff like this for a while -- reverting moves of
Sep11 casualties after there was a consensus to move them to the
memorial wiki.


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
  > That's why I keep hoping that the people who pop up and say "hey, this
> would be a lot better with postgresql" can quantify the claim by making
> the software work with postgresql and actually comparing performance with
> the same operations on the same dataset on the same machine -- things we
> can't do until the software is able to run with postgresql.

Well, there are 2 ways, as usual. The fast way is to use the scripts
coming with pg to convert tables. There are even tools to convert
queries. But this will give a result you don't want to test performence
with. The second one is to set up tables and views and indices as
requiered by wikipedia, to get the best performance.

I think there have to be one step in the middle, the step Lee mentioned:
all sql - commands in the wiki php code should replaced by functions,
included from sql.inc or so. Then a change of database will affect one
file, and not nearly all. I looked a short look at the sql-tables last
weekend, just for fun, and at the different types mysql and pg using.
Unfortunaly it is very hard to get the structure of how tables are used,
  if the queries are spreaded so much.

But, I will start porting the tables as soon I found some spare time.
Lee, is there a loctation where I can get these mysql statements you
isolated?

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


body: do we generate the HTML from Wiki code every single time a page is viewed?


body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Tarky-dude! Chill! Just surf over to
>
>  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(slogans)
>
>and check out the excellently laid-out refactoring job that Martin and Cunc did!
>
>Far out, man!!
>
>Surfer Dude (can't keep a good man down)
>
/me slaps surfer dude over the head with a rather large trout.
yuo iz n0t teh l33t

just had a thought about these slogan articles --
what if we have the title "plain", but have a standard disclaimer in the
first paragraph, eg:

''This article is about the use of a controversial slogan, its
derivation and cultural significance. In giving information about the
slogan, Wikipedia does not approve of its use and remain neutral''

or something


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Naming conventions - use of the word Slogan to	qualify
 a title

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 18:32, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>james duffy wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The Cunctator has already annoyed people involved in the debate by his
>>>unilateral action.
>>>
>>>
>>Cunc has been doing stuff like this for a while -- reverting moves of
>>Sep11 casualties after there was a consensus to move them to the
>>memorial wiki.
>>
>>
>
>A consensus in which I had not been involved, and an issue which was
>handled with equanimity and lack of finger-pointing or blaming by Martin
>and myself.
>
Ok, sorry.
I shouldn't have dragged it up.
Glad to hear the sep11 wiki business is all sorted  :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> All database access in the system should go through the functions
> in DatabaseFunctions.php.  The only one that might be tricky to
> implement is wfInsertID(), which currently depends on a MySQL
> extension for auto-increment fields.  But most databases have some
> similar feature.

Ok, I will try to understand what is the extention they made, first look
at the function in the mysql docs did not give me a hint. Possibly I
miss at midnight the reason why I need to know this number and what
extention is handled with it. But currval(seq-name) must be similar.

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> ''This article is about the use of a controversial slogan, its
> derivation and cultural significance. In giving information about the
> slogan, Wikipedia does not approve of its use and remain neutral''

Please don't do this. We already have too many disclaimers as it is.
(Spoiler warnings being the most annoying -- someone even added one to the
Santa Claus article!) With overly offensive slogans, we should simply have
some indication in the title that this is an article about the slogan, not
a page using or endorsing the slogan. I don't care whether you put
"slogan" on the end or at the beginning, but if this becomes an
unresolvable issue, I suggest a vote.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: legal liability issues

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>However common sense plays a role here. Consider the situation of anyone
>>contemplating a lawsuit against you...
>>
>>From our perspective, NPOV is a great mechanism for avoiding libel,
>because it's pretty hard to libel someone without taking any position.
>
>As far as the liability we might have for words posted by a random
>contributor, the DMCA gives a pretty strong defense to that.
>
The argument is always available that the person who claims to be
libeled has as much right to change the offending material as anybody else.

Ec.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Links Within a Table

body:
On Internet-Encyclopedia, for example at

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/wiki/history

if there is a table all links (whether an article exits or not) are in blue.

Any clue as to what is happening?

Fred


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] server statistics

body:
The German server statistics on
http://de.wikipedia.org/stats/
are having problems with our umlauts. Article titles seem to be cut off
at umlauts. Can this be fixed somehow? (After the more serious problems
we're facing at the moment ...)

BTW, there are only 30 referrers shown (which is the most interresting
part for me). They are mostly search engines, so it would be nice to
have, say, the top 100 referrers. Is this possible?

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>>(Thomas Corell <T.Corell at t-online.de>):
>>
>>Ok, I will try to understand what is the extention they made, first look
>>at the function in the mysql docs did not give me a hint. Possibly I
>>miss at midnight the reason why I need to know this number and what
>>extention is handled with it. But currval(seq-name) must be similar.
>
> The MySQL extension is the availability of auto-increment integer
> fields. They're handy when you need an integer key value that's
> guaranteed to be unique, but you don't care what it is. Without the
> extension, you can do that by keeping a "last used ID" filed value
> in a separate table and updating it every time you insert. But with
> MySQL, you just go ahead and do the insert, and then ask it "Oh,
> by the way, what integer value did you just assign to the auto-
> increment field of the record I just inserted?"

Oh, they call that an extention. Well. There's a serial/serial8 type in
Postgres, which implicitly creates a sequence and you can use the
functions nextval() and currval(). So a definition of e.g. "cur_id
serial8 PRIMARY KEY" should handle this.

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table

body:
Well, this is easily tested. Can anyone access the referenced page with a
browser that correctly shows red (most links are empty).

Fred

> From: Richard Grevers <dramatic at xtra.co.nz>
> Organization: Dramatic Design
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 01:15:38 +1200
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table
>
> On Thu, 27 Mar 2003 03:04:19 -0700, Fred Bauder
> <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>> On Internet-Encyclopedia, for example at
>>
>> http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/wiki/history
>>
>> if there is a table all links (whether an article exits or not) are in
>> blue.
>>
>> Any clue as to what is happening?
>>
> It's probably browser specific. Some browsers (Netscape 4, IE 5) have bugs
> where they don't inherit styles into tables. This can be overcome by
> something like:
> foo, TD foo {color:red;}
> --
> Richard Grevers
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Images not working

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 12:31:30PM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
> Someone uploaded the image Beethoven_wiki.jpg from the English Wikipedia
> to the Dutch one under the name Beethoven.jpg; however, the image does not
> show; instead there is just a bit of text being the internal URL of the
> image (http://nl.wikipedia.org/upload/6/6f/Beethoven.jpg). Thinking
> something had gone wrong, I re-uploaded the image, but without any change.
> What is going on, and how can this be avoided?
>
> Andre Engels

I have also had a problem very similar to this.  I was running Mozilla,
and uploaded a newer version of an old image.  After I did that, it
would display in every other browser (IE, Chimera), but Mozilla would
just report the image as corrupted (if I tried to view it) or it would
just be missing from the page if it was inline.  After killing the
Mozilla cache, it loaded just fine.  Go figure - never seen that before.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Skins

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 10:43:14AM +1200, Richard Grevers wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:55:56 -0600, Nick Reinking
> <nick at twoevils.org> wrote:
>
> >Speaking of skins, I've been hoping for a stylesheet that is more
> >suitable for the 'advanced' user - something that makes it easy to do
> >things as quick and efficiently as possible.
> >
> >I've created a full finished page, and put it out on my webserver.  All
> >of the CSS is in this one file (instead of linking against the standard
> >CSS file, which I can't edit.)
> >
> >Here are some notes, but I got tired of writing them down after a while:
> >
> >1) a.stub has identical elements in both the HTML and the external CSS
> >file. [removed one]
> >2) #quickbar a.new is broken (CC2200 should be #CC2200) [fixed]
> >3) JabbaSkript is removed.
> >4) CSS is in alphabetical order (tons easier to read and much clearer).
> >5) Removed the pull-down and Go button from topbar.
> >6) Removed bgcolor from <body>
> >7) Removed Main Page, Recent changes, Edit this page, and Older versions
> >from the topbar.
> >8) Removed the <p> under "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
> >9) Removed Wikipedia logo.
> >10) Abolished 'article' CSS section (the article is the content, isn't
> >it?)
> >11) Moved 'footer' out of 'content' section.
> >...
> >
> >Anyways, here is where you can take a look:
> >Original: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
> >Revamped: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html
> >
> >It uses CSS2 heavily, and so it probably won't render in any
> >non-compliant browser (which is fine for 'alternative' skins, I hear).
> >
> Nice, but your fixed div at the top is too short for my default font size,
> so the text is truncated. You probably need to set the div height in ems.
> And I prefer lower contrast than black on white.

I could never figure out how to set high in ems, when you were going to
have inline buttons. I would do that if I could.  Maybe just set it to
like 2 or 3ems, and deal with it.

As for contrast, I will probably change that.  It was just a quick
mockup.  :)  You can have hot pink text on a yellow background.  :P
(j/k)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Skins

body:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:14:23PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>
>
> Richard Grevers wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:55:56 -0600, Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>
> >wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>Anyways, here is where you can take a look:
> >>Original: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
> >>Revamped: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html
> >>
> >>It uses CSS2 heavily, and so it probably won't render in any
> >>non-compliant browser (which is fine for 'alternative' skins, I hear).
> >>
> >Nice, but your fixed div at the top is too short for my default font
> >size, so the text is truncated. You probably need to set the div
> >height in ems.
>
> Yup.
> And have you applied styling to the form buttons? I think it's best to
> let the browser supply the user's OS default widgets, so they *look*
> like things that perform actions.
> I miss the wikipedia logo too :(

Alright, I will remove styling from the buttons.  I couldn't get them to
look right, anyways.  As for the logo, I can put that back in, I was
just trying for a page that loads as quickly as possible.  Every page
loaded without the image is one less 304 generated on the server.  :)

Now, if we had a Wikipede... ;)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 06:36:29AM +0100, Thomas Corell wrote:
> Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> >>(Thomas Corell <T.Corell at t-online.de>):
> >>
> >>Ok, I will try to understand what is the extention they made, first look
> >>at the function in the mysql docs did not give me a hint. Possibly I
> >>miss at midnight the reason why I need to know this number and what
> >>extention is handled with it. But currval(seq-name) must be similar.
> >
> >The MySQL extension is the availability of auto-increment integer
> >fields. They're handy when you need an integer key value that's
> >guaranteed to be unique, but you don't care what it is. Without the
> >extension, you can do that by keeping a "last used ID" filed value
> >in a separate table and updating it every time you insert. But with
> >MySQL, you just go ahead and do the insert, and then ask it "Oh,
> >by the way, what integer value did you just assign to the auto-
> >increment field of the record I just inserted?"
>
> Oh, they call that an extention. Well. There's a serial/serial8 type in
> Postgres, which implicitly creates a sequence and you can use the
> functions nextval() and currval(). So a definition of e.g. "cur_id
> serial8 PRIMARY KEY" should handle this.

Or just serial, which would be considerably faster than serial8, unless
you think that you will end up with more than 2147483648 rows (2^31).

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table

body:
On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 06:41, Fred Bauder wrote:
> Well, this is easily tested. Can anyone access the referenced page with a
> browser that correctly shows red (most links are empty).

I'd love to, but:
Not Found
The requested URL /wiki/history was not found on this server.

Apache/1.3.27 Server at internet-encyclopedia.info Port 80

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Minimal skin (comments desired)

body:
Okay, how about now?  Any comments would be appreciated.

Original: http:///www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
Minimal: http:///www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html

Note that I think the footer (on all the pages) should be changed from
'It was last modified...' to '(Article title) was last modified...'; but
that isn't part of my skin.  :)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Skins

body:
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:55:56 -0600, Nick Reinking
<nick at twoevils.org> wrote:

> Speaking of skins, I've been hoping for a stylesheet that is more
> suitable for the 'advanced' user - something that makes it easy to do
> things as quick and efficiently as possible.
>
> I've created a full finished page, and put it out on my webserver.  All
> of the CSS is in this one file (instead of linking against the standard
> CSS file, which I can't edit.)
>
> Here are some notes, but I got tired of writing them down after a while:
>
> 1) a.stub has identical elements in both the HTML and the external CSS
> file. [removed one]
> 2) #quickbar a.new is broken (CC2200 should be #CC2200) [fixed]
> 3) JabbaSkript is removed.
> 4) CSS is in alphabetical order (tons easier to read and much clearer).
> 5) Removed the pull-down and Go button from topbar.
> 6) Removed bgcolor from <body>
> 7) Removed Main Page, Recent changes, Edit this page, and Older versions
> from the topbar.
> 8) Removed the <p> under "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
> 9) Removed Wikipedia logo.
> 10) Abolished 'article' CSS section (the article is the content, isn't
> it?)
> 11) Moved 'footer' out of 'content' section.
> ...
>
> Anyways, here is where you can take a look:
> Original: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
> Revamped: http://www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html
>
> It uses CSS2 heavily, and so it probably won't render in any
> non-compliant browser (which is fine for 'alternative' skins, I hear).
>
Nice, but your fixed div at the top is too short for my default font size,
so the text is truncated. You probably need to set the div height in ems.
And I prefer lower contrast than black on white.

--
Richard Grevers


from_name: Weeger Nicolas

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again <- my mistake

body:
Hi everyone.
I just subscribed, but read the previous threads, specially the one on Wikipedia Dead Again.

All my apologies, i'm the one who killed the server by doing a bad query.

I don't ask for forgiveness, but i just want to explain what i did, because 1) i think it's the right thing to do 2) i wonder about something

(working on the fr database, btw)

So here's what i did:
* first i did a query to try to find articles with a link to a redirect (and thus fix those links). It was around 11:30 (french hour).
iirc the query was:

select l.cur_title, r.cur_title from cur l inner join links lnk on l.cur_title = lnk.l_from inner join cur r on r.cur_title = lnk.l_to where r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'

Note that it's the same as the killing one, without the 'binary'.
It took a few minutes, server down during that time (already bad), around 5 i think, then i got some answers. Many duplicates, as string comparison seems case-insensitive.
But the server WAS responding after it, of that I'm quite sure.

So i checked MySQL docs, and found the 'binary' trick to force case-sensitivity for comparisons. Now before doing the query again, i wanted to check how many records there are in 'links' table.

So here comes the easy query:

select count( * ) from links

Here is what is weird: after that one, the server didn't reply. I don't remember doing the query with the 'binary', though i probably did it since it's in the logs ^_-

I think i have recollection troubles, probably due to the shame of having killed the server -.-

Learned lessons:
1) learn the database format before doing big queries
2) use the 'explain' keyword (thanks Brian for that one)
3) install the database to my local comp to play with queries without killing everything !

Ryo who will take extra care with requests...


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 06:07:04PM +0100, Thomas Corell wrote:
> Nick Reinking wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 06:36:29AM +0100, Thomas Corell wrote:
> >
> >>Oh, they call that an extention. Well. There's a serial/serial8 type in
> >>Postgres, which implicitly creates a sequence and you can use the
> >>functions nextval() and currval(). So a definition of e.g. "cur_id
> >>serial8 PRIMARY KEY" should handle this.
> >Or just serial, which would be considerably faster than serial8, unless
> >you think that you will end up with more than 2147483648 rows (2^31).
>
> Only to meassure my expectations for wikipedia ;) But keep in mind that
> reusing serials is not part of the pg concept, but as far as I know
> mysql does. E.g. deleting articles may spend a serial.

Fair enough, I do believe you're right.  Still, deleted articles are not
terribly common, and I think we should design this with maximum
performance in mind.  If we hit some odd 1.8B articles in the future, we
can always figure out a way to change it to serial8.  :)

Speaking of maximum performance... I have a question concerning our
implementation.  What will be more important in the future, clean and
efficient code, or backwards compatibility?  Especially when you
consider the reverse_timestamp hacks everywhere that won't be needed in
MySQL4 (or PostgreSQL), I would think that we should just drop MySQL3
support (especially considering that it is easy to upgrade, and nobody
will be using it in a year or two).  But, maybe I'm crazy - anybody else
have any comments?

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Weeger Nicolas wrote:

> Hi everyone.
> I just subscribed, but read the previous threads, specially the one on Wikipedia Dead Again.
>
> All my apologies, i'm the one who killed the server by doing a bad query.
>
> I don't ask for forgiveness, but i just want to explain what i did, because 1) i think it's the right thing to do 2) i wonder about something
>
> (working on the fr database, btw)
>
> So here's what i did:
> * first i did a query to try to find articles with a link to a redirect (and thus fix those links). It was around 11:30 (french hour).
> iirc the query was:
>
> select l.cur_title, r.cur_title from cur l inner join links lnk on l.cur_title = lnk.l_from inner join cur r on r.cur_title = lnk.l_to where r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'

I know SQL only through what I know through Wikipedia, and I don't know
things like 'inner join', but "r.cur_text like '%#redirect%'" would
certainly be better as "r.cur_is_redirect=1". The way I would do this
query is:

SELECT l_from,cur_title FROM links,cur WHERE l_to=cur_id AND cur_is_redirect=1
(although in general I do not see any need to bother with 'repairing' this
anyway)

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Images not working

body:
Someone uploaded the image Beethoven_wiki.jpg from the English Wikipedia
to the Dutch one under the name Beethoven.jpg; however, the image does not
show; instead there is just a bit of text being the internal URL of the
image (http://nl.wikipedia.org/upload/6/6f/Beethoven.jpg). Thinking
something had gone wrong, I re-uploaded the image, but without any change.
What is going on, and how can this be avoided?

Andre Engels


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> > Oh, they call that an extention. Well. There's a serial/serial8 type in
> > Postgres, which implicitly creates a sequence and you can use the
> > functions nextval() and currval(). So a definition of e.g. "cur_id
> > serial8 PRIMARY KEY" should handle this.
>
> Or just serial, which would be considerably faster than serial8, unless
> you think that you will end up with more than 2147483648 rows (2^31).

But the issue is not just the database--it's how to implement the
wfInsertID() function in the wiki code. PHP's Postgres functions don't
have anything like it, so you'll have to do something like get_last_oid()
and then retrieve the serial field value by OID.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> Speaking of maximum performance... I have a question concerning our
> implementation.  What will be more important in the future, clean and
> efficient code, or backwards compatibility?  Especially when you
> consider the reverse_timestamp hacks everywhere that won't be needed in
> MySQL4 (or PostgreSQL), I would think that we should just drop MySQL3
> support (especially considering that it is easy to upgrade, and nobody
> will be using it in a year or two).  But, maybe I'm crazy - anybody else
> have any comments?

Depends on what you want compatibility with. The internal workings
of the code are completely fair game as far as I'm concerned.  MySQL 4
will get rid of the reverse-timestamp hack, and if we want to use
Postgres or something else, we can.  The "public interface" to the
wiki is the URLs of various pages.  Those should change as little as
possible.  But how they are implemented under the scenes is not a
"compatibility" issue at all--hell, the whole thing might be replaced
with Java servlets and an object database for all I care.

That's the whole point of client-server separation after all--how the
server does its job is none of the client's business, only the fact
that it does, in fact, meet its obligations. That's what I'm writing
the test suite for.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 01:07:12PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
> >
> > Speaking of maximum performance... I have a question concerning our
> > implementation.  What will be more important in the future, clean and
> > efficient code, or backwards compatibility?  Especially when you
> > consider the reverse_timestamp hacks everywhere that won't be needed in
> > MySQL4 (or PostgreSQL), I would think that we should just drop MySQL3
> > support (especially considering that it is easy to upgrade, and nobody
> > will be using it in a year or two).  But, maybe I'm crazy - anybody else
> > have any comments?
>
> Depends on what you want compatibility with. The internal workings
> of the code are completely fair game as far as I'm concerned.  MySQL 4
> will get rid of the reverse-timestamp hack, and if we want to use
> Postgres or something else, we can.  The "public interface" to the
> wiki is the URLs of various pages.  Those should change as little as
> possible.  But how they are implemented under the scenes is not a
> "compatibility" issue at all--hell, the whole thing might be replaced
> with Java servlets and an object database for all I care.
>
> That's the whole point of client-server separation after all--how the
> server does its job is none of the client's business, only the fact
> that it does, in fact, meet its obligations. That's what I'm writing
> the test suite for.

Well, I was thinking about people running the Wikipedia code (other than
Wikipedia itself).  They will have MySQL3 databases that require the
reverse_timestamp hack - will we continue to keep this cruft in the
Wikipedia code to support those people who don't want to migrate their
databases, or will just clean it up and tell them to migrate their
database, or stay with the old code (which is perfectly functionable,
mostly).

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
> Well, I was thinking about people running the Wikipedia code (other than
> Wikipedia itself).  They will have MySQL3 databases that require the
> reverse_timestamp hack - will we continue to keep this cruft in the
> Wikipedia code to support those people who don't want to migrate their
> databases, or will just clean it up and tell them to migrate their
> database, or stay with the old code (which is perfectly functionable,
> mostly).

I, personally, am not the least bit interested in making the wikipedia
code easy to use for others.  It's GPL, and open, so others can do with
it what they like, but my efforts will be 100% toward making Wikipedia
work, and nothing else. If that inconveniences others who might have
chosen to use the code, well, that's was their choice.

I do, on the other hand, concede that the ability for others to
install and use the code does help the code evolve; the more eyeballs
on it, the better.  So I am willing to make a few concessions in
that direction, but only insofar as they serve the primary goal,
which is Wikipedia.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia dead again

body:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 02:35:55PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > Well, I was thinking about people running the Wikipedia code (other than
> > Wikipedia itself).  They will have MySQL3 databases that require the
> > reverse_timestamp hack - will we continue to keep this cruft in the
> > Wikipedia code to support those people who don't want to migrate their
> > databases, or will just clean it up and tell them to migrate their
> > database, or stay with the old code (which is perfectly functionable,
> > mostly).
>
> I, personally, am not the least bit interested in making the wikipedia
> code easy to use for others.  It's GPL, and open, so others can do with
> it what they like, but my efforts will be 100% toward making Wikipedia
> work, and nothing else. If that inconveniences others who might have
> chosen to use the code, well, that's was their choice.
>
> I do, on the other hand, concede that the ability for others to
> install and use the code does help the code evolve; the more eyeballs
> on it, the better.  So I am willing to make a few concessions in
> that direction, but only insofar as they serve the primary goal,
> which is Wikipedia.

Fair enough.  Big smileys from me.  :)

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table

body:
On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 14:20, Fred Bauder wrote:
> Ok, Try:
>
> http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/wiki.phtml?title=History

Fine and dandy in Mozilla 1.3.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> Nick Reinking wrote:
> >Okay, how about now?  Any comments would be appreciated.
> >
> >Original: http:///www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit.html
> >Minimal: http:///www.twoevils.org/files/wiki/Rabbit-minimal.html

I do find the general look a bit refreshing. I've been wandering around
Ward's original Wiki, and it's... while perhaps rather Spartan, also
quite comfortable. We have too much clutter in our interface. Refactor
away!

On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 14:30, tarquin wrote:
> Put a title on the list of language links, like "Other languages:" or
> "This page in other languages".
> It's great to see that list of lang links vertical instead of
> horizontal!!!! :-D

That's actually going to be problematic, as the floating sidebar can't
be scrolled vertically and the limited vertical space will be quickly
used up, particularly on smaller screens. Some of our general topics
already have a dozen or more language links, and this sample sidebar
doesn't include actions for logged-in users (move, upload, watch) or
admin tasks (protect, delete).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: is it possible?

body:
On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 14:08, Paul Ebermann wrote:
> "Chuck Smith" skribis:
> > Is it possible if someone types the name of an article
> > which doesn't yet have any text that that person could
> > be sent to a search page for that topic.  Thus, if I
> > type http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen, instead
> > of getting a page saying that this page doesn't exist,
> > I would instead get the search results page?  Would
> > anyone else want this?
>
> Another option: only show additionally to the

So, did anyone read the old discussion from
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_page_page ?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table

body:
Ok, Try:

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/wiki.phtml?title=History

Thanks,

Fred

> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: 27 Mar 2003 10:07:25 -0800
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table
>
> On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 06:41, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> Well, this is easily tested. Can anyone access the referenced page with a
>> browser that correctly shows red (most links are empty).
>
> I'd love to, but:
> Not Found
> The requested URL /wiki/history was not found on this server.
>
> Apache/1.3.27 Server at internet-encyclopedia.info Port 80
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table

body:
Well, it does seem to be a netscape 4.x problem. IE works.

Fred

> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: 27 Mar 2003 10:07:25 -0800
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Links Within a Table
>
> On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 06:41, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> Well, this is easily tested. Can anyone access the referenced page with a
>> browser that correctly shows red (most links are empty).
>
> I'd love to, but:
> Not Found
> The requested URL /wiki/history was not found on this server.
>
> Apache/1.3.27 Server at internet-encyclopedia.info Port 80
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Today

body:
Today (Thursday), my Internet access was dead all day.  So, I'm way
behind.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Today


body:
On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 15:01, Kurt Jansson wrote:
> Brion Vibber schrieb:
> > On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 14:30, tarquin wrote:
> >>It's great to see that list of lang links vertical instead of
> >>horizontal!!!! :-D
> >
> > That's actually going to be problematic, as the floating sidebar can't
> > be scrolled vertically and the limited vertical space will be quickly
> > used up, particularly on smaller screens.
>
> How about a drop down box?

I believe I've already answered that on wikipedia-l:

On Sat, 2003-02-22 at 12:15, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Jay Bowks wrote:
> > How about a drop down list box, such as the one on the TEJO site? That
> > would be very economical as to space and give plenty of options to
> > choose from.
>
> I'm generally leery of drop-down boxes as they don't show the available
> options until you've gone to the trouble of asking what's available. And
> if the available options are different for each page, that's going to
> spell trouble. People will check a few times, then stop looking once
> they've found that their language never comes up.
>
> Wiki is about serendipidous discovery; part of that is seeing that a link
> to Chinese or Polish or Esperanto or Volapuk or Latin or French is
> available without having thought to seek it out.
>
> However, it's a direction worth looking into.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: is it possible?

body:
> > I would not like it. I use this method (creating
> the URL of the page by
> > hand) sometimes when I want to create a page and
> there are no links to it,
> > or I am not sure.
>
> I do this too and I would find the proposed change
> frustrating.

I think it would also be possible to create a link
from that search page where you could write the
non-existant article.  But perhaps that makes things
too complicated...

Chuck

=====
Learn Esperanto! - http://www.lernu.net/
Enciklopedio: http://eo.wikipedia.org/

___________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en fran?ais !
Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Michel Mouly

subject: [Wikitech-l] Using TeX

body:
Hi!

If you remember, I have set up a small very local wiki using the wikipedia
scripts. Thanks for the comments I received last time. They were very
valuable.

I have not solved my problem with page editing; I intended to reload all
the scripts. I got an account on sourceforge, but did not (yet) manage the
download. I have a password pb. Is it needed to be registered in the
project itself to download?

One of the reasons why I looked to wikipedia was because of maths and the
use of TeX.

However, when I looked to the details, I found (to my taste) too many
limitations with the followed approach. Then I wrote an extension to
outputpage.php to replace the call to texvc by calls to pdflatex then
imagemagick convert. This has reached the stage of minimal functionality
(translation and caching). This allows me to have full maths, without
having to remember what is supported or not, or modified, compared to
LaTeX. In addition, we intend to use it for small music scores (using Mu
sixTeX or possibly PMX), and I have in mind some other uses of LaTeX.

Please understand that I'm not trying to (re)open a debate. I've read the
"math markup" page on meta.wikipedia (and music markup as well), and I'm
aware of (some of) the drawbacks of the approach I followed. I mentionned
what I did just in conformance with GPL: if there is any interest in this
small piece of code (which I doubt, it's rather trivial!), just say it.

Michel Mouly