subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing mail server

body:
With yet another sendmail vulnerability announced today (and still no
handy RPM upgrade from Red Hat -- what's wrong with you people, it's been
several hours! ;) I'm switching the mail server to postfix.

If all goes smoothly, there should be no loss of mail.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing mail server

body:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> With yet another sendmail vulnerability announced today (and still no
> handy RPM upgrade from Red Hat -- what's wrong with you people, it's been
> several hours! ;) I'm switching the mail server to postfix.
>
> If all goes smoothly, there should be no loss of mail.

Okay, this mail is going via postfix. Hope it gets through. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing mail server

body:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> With yet another sendmail vulnerability announced today (and still no
> handy RPM upgrade from Red Hat -- what's wrong with you people, it's been
> several hours! ;) I'm switching the mail server to postfix.
>
> If all goes smoothly, there should be no loss of mail.

Okay, this mail is going through postfix. Let's hope it gets there. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing mail server

body:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> With yet another sendmail vulnerability announced today (and still no
> handy RPM upgrade from Red Hat -- what's wrong with you people, it's been
> several hours! ;) I'm switching the mail server to postfix.
>
> If all goes smoothly, there should be no loss of mail.

Let's give it a try...

-- brion


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mail server changed

body:
In the wake of a new bug in sendmail, I've switched Wikipedia's mail
daemon from sendmail to postfix. It shouldn't act any different as far as
us humans can see, and any mail sendmail was trying to deliver should
still go through.

There were a couple minutes where the mailing lists wouldn't have worked
as I was switching things over, but I didn't see anyone else try to send
through them during that time so hopefully there's no problem. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Table markup

body:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 14:27:10 +0200, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de>
gave utterance to the following:

> Erik Zachte wrote:
>
>> Magnus, I do agree that most <tr..> options are redundant.
>>
>> However I did find some that may qualify (there will be more but this is
>> what I found in half an hour). Most address alignment.
>> (<table align=..> has a different purpose)
>
> OK, I'm convinced! :-)
>
> TR will be implemented within the hour, like this:
> |- align=top
>
> I will also integrate <caption> better, and change it to '|+' !
>
>> The option most used for table cells by far is align=...
>> What do you think? Would a wiki shortcut for this be useful?
>> If so, some suggestions for syntax, shown in this order:
>> left,right,center.
>> (align=left for completeness sake, left is default)
>
> IMHO we shouldn't mess with the attributes at all. Too much wiki markup
> might turn out to be more confusing then HTML.
>
Especially since those are all deprecated attributes in the newer
standards.

--
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried


list: wikien-l

from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Bot for generating articles on cities in Israel

body:
Tucci wrote:

>Luckily, we have adopted the
>NPOV policy, which does not require such an
>organization.  It only requires that potentially
>sensitive facts be attributed to the proper
>organization.  In this case, that organization appears
>to be the Israeli census bureau.  Hence, these
>potentially disputable statistics should be attributed
>to the organization that collected them.
>
yup.

>Just to let my own biases be known, I think all the
>Israelis and Palestinians should be sent to some
>useless corner of Mars where they can kill each other
>in peace (ironic, huh?), and all their territory
>converted to recycling plants or solar power cells or
>desalinization plants or, hell, a giant museum
>dedicated to people who think it's ever holy to kill
>other people (might have to use Syria too, cuz it'd be
>big).
>
Great plan!

Come on guys, can we take this off-list please?
Start a [[Wikipedia:*]] page for it.


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Changing mail server

body:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 11:21:40PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > With yet another sendmail vulnerability announced today (and still no
> > handy RPM upgrade from Red Hat -- what's wrong with you people, it's been
> > several hours! ;) I'm switching the mail server to postfix.
> >
> > If all goes smoothly, there should be no loss of mail.
>
> Okay, this mail is going through postfix. Let's hope it gets there. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Well, I certainly haven't received any email.  ;)  Glad you switched,
anyways.  Postfix is faster than sendmail, anyways - I hate waiting for
forever for listserv messages to arrive in the middle of the day.  :)

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


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Distribution of load (was Re: Memory leak in apache
	on pliny?)

body:
On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 04:34:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> >
> >>Is there a reason why we can't put all the web servers on one
> >>machine, and the database on the other?
> >
> >
> >Larousse is too slow, it's already overloaded: too many processes waiting
> >on each other, no idle time. When it's upgraded, then we finish the
> >separation.
>
> Forgive me if this is a naive question, but why do we want each server
> to be specialised?
>
> Larousse is constantly maxed out for CPU. It loads PHP, Apache, the PHP
> scripts and a large portion of the cached HTML into memory, and it still
> has plenty left over. It barely touches the disk.
>
> The biggest CPU users on pliny are the apache subprocesses for
> other-language wikis. MySQL needs all the memory it can get its hands on
> (much of it in the form of buffers). Even with 2 GB (?) of memory, pliny
> spends most of its time waiting for the hard drive.
>
> Soon pliny and larousse will have roughly the same capabilities. So why
> not give them roughly the same tasks? If we move the other-language
> webserving to larousse, pliny's CPUs will have nothing left to do!
>
> I think we should rotate the webserving between larousse and pliny.
> Ideally we would load balance it so that pliny has a bit of CPU time
> left over for the DB.
>
> DB replication will help spread out the disk access requirements,
> although the DB cache will be essentially duplicated on each machine.
> The reliability gains make DB replication very attractive, if someone
> has the time to set it up.
>
> Probably the best performance would be obtained by splitting the largest
> tables of the database between larousse and pliny, although that's
> technically difficult and not very robust.
>
> -- Tim Starling.

Your argument is very well reasoned, and it would make sense, in an
ideal world.  Sadly, I wouldn't say the current state of both the x86
architecture and Linux 2.4 is particularly ideal.  Generally, you'll
want these two services on different machines for a number of reasons,
but here are the big ones:

1) When a big database query is made, it tends to monopolize the whole
machine, meaning that web servers can become starved for resources.
2) Context switching is a bitch, especially when you have hundreds of
active processes running, as we do.

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


from_name: Nik

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Re: Problem with updating pages

body:
Ok, thanks for all your help, I may just reinstall the whole redhat box with
RH9 and see if that makes a difference.

Cheers

Nik

"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:1063806829.6925.10.camel at frank.vibber.org...
> On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 06:18, Nik wrote:
> > Sorry to 'bug' you all, did anyone have a moment to look at this?
Cheers,
> > nik.
>
> The one you showed looks fine, I'm mystified.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Before I start, let me say Thanks to Tim for what may have been a very
expensive phone call this morning when pliny fell over.  His prompt
action allowed Jason to get it going again quickly.

> Forgive me if this is a naive question, but why do we want each server
> to be specialised?

We have been told that it would be best to do it that way.  Also, we
are moving in the direction of a 3-server layout and then most likely
to a 4-server layout after that.

The 3-server layout is going to be like this --

First, larousse and pliny are going to be upgraded to much faster dual
CPU athlons with lots of RAM.  They will be nearly identical hardware
after the upgrade.  Both will be significantly faster.

Next, we are going to get a big honking database server, probably an
Opteron with as much RAM as we can afford.  Base price of this will be
$6,000, and I'm going to beg for everyone to contribute money to help
me with this.

At that point, we'll have 2 webservers fronting for the db machine.
(I'll also loan an iptables based loadbalancing machine for the front
end if we want to do it that way.)

It is my belief, based on experience, that such a design will have
4-10 times the capacity of what we are doing now.  Possibly more.

Even so, of course we want to be pro-active about the next step, and
that will likely be either a third webserver, if that's where the
tight spot seems to be at that time, or a second db server for
'difficult' queries, if that's where the tight spot seems to be at
that time.  It's an empirical question, I think, which will be best at
that time.

> Larousse is constantly maxed out for CPU. It loads PHP, Apache, the PHP
> scripts and a large portion of the cached HTML into memory, and it still
> has plenty left over. It barely touches the disk.
>
> The biggest CPU users on pliny are the apache subprocesses for
> other-language wikis. MySQL needs all the memory it can get its hands on
> (much of it in the form of buffers). Even with 2 GB (?) of memory, pliny
> spends most of its time waiting for the hard drive.
>
> Soon pliny and larousse will have roughly the same capabilities. So why
> not give them roughly the same tasks? If we move the other-language
> webserving to larousse, pliny's CPUs will have nothing left to do!

Well, that's a very good point.  But Experts Have Offered Different
Opinions.  :-) I'm not saying you're wrong, of course.

> Probably the best performance would be obtained by splitting the largest
> tables of the database between larousse and pliny, although that's
> technically difficult and not very robust.

Right.  And we do need to consider the upgrade path as well.

The Opteron (or IA64, I suppose) machine will be purchased as soon as
possible.  I've already contributed $2500 to get the Wikimedia
Foundation bank account underway.  Various persons have contributed
just under $1000 so far, but we haven't really made a pitch for more
money.  I think getting the rest will be pretty easy.

The biggest obstacle right now to getting that machine is not money,
per se, but rather my desire to wait _just a bit_ for the technology
to be more mature and widely available.  Right now, finding Opteron
machines that accept SCSI drives is not impossible, but difficult, and
probably more expensive by a fair amount than it will be in a couple
of months.

This machine is going to be a big investment, so we want it to have a
clear upgrade path, which means we will want to be sure we can drop in
a faster pair of CPUs in the future.  And we want to be sure that
there's plenty of slots for insane amounts of RAM once the 2 gig chips
fall in price to be the sweet spot.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

body:
Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] will be back and editing.  I ask anyone who has had any
trouble with him in the past to be especially welcoming and let's all
try to make this thing work out well for everyone.

In my earlier message on this topic, I said that Adam could edit under
the name 'Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]'.  He didn't object to that, but on my own, I
realized that I don't really care what name he uses as long as it's
consistent.  A consistent name will let him earn the reputation that
he deserves, based on his edits.

Really, folks, I'm asking everyone for a kindness of heart to let all
bygones be bygones.  Welcome home the prodigal son.

This, of course, goes double for me, the guy who banned him in the
first place.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177

in_reply_to:
<E1A03qh-0001GP-00@genovevo.net>;
	from rednblack@alum.mit.edu on Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 02:49:51PM
	-0400

body:
> So, I'd like some advice on how to deal with this situation.

If he's posting from an ip number, ban him.  EntmootsOfTrolls is not
banned, and is welcome to edit under that identity.  He's also invited
to behave in a co-operative manner, and to come to the mailing list to
discuss any social problems he's having with others.

If I understand what EntmootsOfTrolls said recently, he's disappointed
that he isn't banned.  Maybe he's decided to get himself banned again?

He likes to talk the talk about community governance, but the evidence
shows that he's not the least bit interested in submitting to
community norms.

--Jimbo


from_name: Arno Peters

subject: [Wikitech-l] Memory leak in apache on pliny?

body:
Op 2003.09.17 21:02 schreef Brion Vibber:
> Slowness on the wikis from pliny right now is probably due to either
> Apache problems or database locking issues. I'm open to suggestions.

Could we see the output of netstat, particularly the number of closing
connections.  If there are very many, look into Lingerd:

  http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/

>From their website:
"Lingerd is a daemon (service) designed to take over the job of
properly closing network connections from an http server like Apache.

Because of some technical complications in the way TCP/IP and HTTP
work, each Apache process currently wastes a lot of time "lingering" on
client connections, after the page has been generated and sent. Lingerd
takes over this job, leaving the Apache process immediately free to
handle a new connection. As a result, Lingerd makes it possible to
serve the same load using considerably fewer Apache processes. This
translates into a reduced load on the server."

Here's some interesting reading on tuning Apache:

  http://www.iagora.com/about/software/lingerd/TUNING.txt

Hope it helps,
--
Arno Peters


from_name: rednblack at alum.mit.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177

body:
Hi,

I've been fighting for roughly the past half-day with 142.177.*.* (formerly
24.*.*.* and EntmootsOfTrolls) over [[Islamism]] and [[militant Islam]]. I
must admit that I'm not really a very patient person, especially when the other
party is not at all willing to engage, refuses to respond to my points, and
is only interested in pushing his idiosyncratic viewpoint. It's even more
irritating when the user has been hard-banned several times, and writes totally
terrible, unfocused and irrelevant crap on top of everything else.

So, I'd like some advice on how to deal with this situation.

See [[Talk:Islamism]], [[Talk:Militant Islam/Delete]], and [[Wikipedia:Problem
users]], where he listed myself and RK after I asked to have [[Islamism]]
protected, for discussion. I'll admit my bias: I wrote most of [[Islamism]],
and while it isn't perfect and needs a whole lot of work, I feel that the
changes 142 is making are totally inappropriate.

Saurabh (Graft)

------
[T]he system isn't great leaders, great machinating people controlling it all.
It's each person performing their job as one little cog in this thing..
-- Terry Gilliam, on 'Brazil'


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing list again

body:
On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 06:55:09PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> grrr

I'm not sure what the problem is?  My inbox has been rapidly filling
with Brion mail all day.  :P

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


from_name: Geoffrey Thomas

body:
Brion Vibber writes:
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > I'm curious as to the beta-ness of mod_throttle on Apache 2.0.  Apache
> > 2.0 really isn't much faster than 1.3 (on UNIX systems with fast context
> > switching, such as Linux), if at all.  Futhermore, the threading model
> > seen in 2.0 has resulted in a lot of modules behaving strangely (because
> > they haven't had adequate debugging time, most likely).  If I had to
> > make a guess, that's what I would say is causing the current problems.
>
> Well, we're running apache 1.3.28, and mod_throttle isn't on pliny.

Is there a reason we aren't using Apache 2? From a newbie's point of view,
2 is a bigger number than 1.3, so it must be better ;-). If the code is in
PHP, how would a newer version of Apache break the code?

Nick Reinking's proposal was to move from Apache 2 to 1.3. We already have
1.3. So why not try moving from 1.3 to 2?

And a few replies down, he also writes:
> Wild speculation is welcome, particularly with falsifiable hypotheses. :)

Okay, then what about thttpd (tiny/turbo/throttling http daemon)?
  http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
"In typical use it's about as fast as the best full-featured servers
(Apache, NCSA, Netscape). Under extreme load it's much faster."
It supports CGI, and IIRC you can configure PHP as a CGI interpreter, so
will it not work (possibly with a few minor changes) with MediaWiki?
The only problem I can see is the /wiki/ RewriteRule, and that might
be solvable with a script /wiki that parses the PATH_INFO or whatever
and calls wiki.phtml with the right parameters.

At the least, thttpd can be installed on one server on a different port,
and, e.g., meta:80 can be redirected to meta:8080 by Apache, just to see
if thttpd _might_ work.

=====
Geoffrey

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 draws near...

body:
OK, I hacked together a Wikimedia fundraising page for
use at http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising/
based on the en.wikipedia donations page.

Please leave comments on the image talk page
(translations/different language versions needed too).

http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fundraising.html

We are also getting real close to the 300,000 article
milestone so I would like to suggest that the meta
version of the press release be frozen to everybody
except Jimbo (who could make changes up to Sunday).
Then all next week the non-English versions would have
time to finalize their versions of the press release.
The week after that I would like to see the
non-English versions distribute their press releases
and for us to wait a week before releasing the English
version (in order to smooth out the load and give the
non-English versions a head start before everything
gets bogged down).

What say you?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing list again

body:
On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:32:10PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 06:55:09PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > grrr
> >
> > I'm not sure what the problem is?  My inbox has been rapidly filling
> > with Brion mail all day.  :P
>
> You didn't get them during the day, did you? They were all delivered in a
> lump at 19:50 UTC or so, about 15 minutes before you wrote your message.

Oh, I wasn't trying to be specific like that.  They did arrive all at
once, because there was a long list of Brion mail in between all my
other mail.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Future outage notes

body:
On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:51:08PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> First, I sincerely hope the upcoming upgrades replace whatever part of
> pliny is defective and has caused crashes regularly ever since we've had
> the machine. (Unless it's software. Who knows?)
>
> Second, a note: the wiki is designed to fall back onto cached pages if the
> database server isn't available. *But*, often it ends up spending an
> inordinate amount of time trying to talk to a server that isn't there, and
> doesn't give up like it should.
>
> A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings)
> and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the
> local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
>
> A clean, automated way to mark the server as Dead Dead Dead would probably
> be good.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Can we just change the IP address in /etc/hosts instead?

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


from_name: Steve Vertigum

subject: [WikiEN-l] shutting people up about Bots

body:
At least Im not preaching to the choir. :)

I have yet to see an direct response to my statements-- Rick said "It's not from a questionable source" --(as if we were to accept these numbers as gospel)  what utter crap is this? ...On the one hand people argue 'there is no unquestionable source (its all fine)-- there is no absolute NPOV. On the other hand they think that an apartheid state is "not questionable."  (Its all fine.) Then LD stated that 'if these numbers were from the Congo, he wouldnt want them.' -- what standard is he using? What standard are *you using?

I frankly dont care -- I raised the objections not because they were popular, but because they were not. Nobody dealt with my basic oppositon to using a bot to add these particular POV statistics-- nobody could prove that they were accurate --plenty of calls to "prove" that they were not. What utter nonsense.

But its irrelevant--All numbers be taken with a grain of salt, right? Im afraid not-- the inclusion of these numbers sets a precedent, where the WP takes a side in an ethnic dispute. When edit wars do happen over these numbers, the use of a bot as an "offical" WP-sanctioned body of data will hold weight disbalancing any disputed terms. To say that this is not the case is heresy against intelligence.

And Senor Dante-- who were you shutting up?

~S~

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> Great plan!
>
> Come on guys, can we take this off-list please?
> Start a [[Wikipedia:*]] page for it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Wikipedia
namespace was only for current, relatively static
policy things, and we use the meta for things like that.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Distribution of load (was Re: Memory leak in apache on
	pliny?)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
>
>> Is there a reason why we can't put all the web servers on one
>>machine, and the database on the other?
>
>
> Larousse is too slow, it's already overloaded: too many processes waiting
> on each other, no idle time. When it's upgraded, then we finish the
> separation.

Forgive me if this is a naive question, but why do we want each server
to be specialised?

Larousse is constantly maxed out for CPU. It loads PHP, Apache, the PHP
scripts and a large portion of the cached HTML into memory, and it still
has plenty left over. It barely touches the disk.

The biggest CPU users on pliny are the apache subprocesses for
other-language wikis. MySQL needs all the memory it can get its hands on
(much of it in the form of buffers). Even with 2 GB (?) of memory, pliny
spends most of its time waiting for the hard drive.

Soon pliny and larousse will have roughly the same capabilities. So why
not give them roughly the same tasks? If we move the other-language
webserving to larousse, pliny's CPUs will have nothing left to do!

I think we should rotate the webserving between larousse and pliny.
Ideally we would load balance it so that pliny has a bit of CPU time
left over for the DB.

DB replication will help spread out the disk access requirements,
although the DB cache will be essentially duplicated on each machine.
The reliability gains make DB replication very attractive, if someone
has the time to set it up.

Probably the best performance would be obtained by splitting the largest
tables of the database between larousse and pliny, although that's
technically difficult and not very robust.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Break

body:
Wikipedia actually forces me to take an indefinite break until the whole
thing is running properly again. A couple of days ago, I wikified a long
page and for once forgot to copy it before pressing the "save" button.
Needless to say, the whole thing was lost irrevocably before I had realized
my mistake. Yesterday I was careless again and added five titles to
Kingturtle's reading list -- lost forever. Now I just wanted to update a
page -- impossible.

I'm still amazed that this is not being discussed. Instead, I am inundated
by e-mails about bots, most of which are just copies of old e-mails with one
sentence added at the bottom. I don't understand participants' priorities
here.

I have been used to having a look at Wikipedia first thing whenever I sit
down at my  computer. I guess I'll keep doing so and occasionally try to
edit an article, but since all good features (watchlist, search function
etc.) are more or less gone and as it now usually takes one minute or so to
get from the edit history back to the article I don't think I'll be able to
contribute a lot. This is just too frustrating.

Whatever happened to the "new server madness"?

KF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Server back up

body:
Server was down for a couple hours. Who knows why; this is the server
that's crashed about once a month since we got it.

I just *love* computers. :P

Thanks to Tim Starling for looking into the problem quickly, and to Jason
for getting the machine rebooted. After some tweaking to get the data
partition mounted :P it seems to have come up okay.

Please notify about any new exciting mysql errors that may come up.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:
> Forgive me if this is a naive question, but why do we want each server
> to be specialised?

Because everyone in the entire universe recommends separating your web
and database servers.

Because load is only expected to *grow*. MySQL's cpu usage is "relatively"
light right now because we've turned off most of the functions that it
really has to churn on.

Additional web servers can be plugged in relatively easily -- if we had
the machines. They eat mainly CPU, and could make more efficient use of
their memory with a distributed cache such as memcached for the easy
stuff - grabbing article text and checking the existence o flinks.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Future outage notes

body:
On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 09:02:23PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:51:08PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings)
> > > and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the
> > > local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
> >
> > Can we just change the IP address in /etc/hosts instead?
>
> Well, we can change a configuration file that's owned by root and
> affects a lot of system-wide things, or we can change a configuration
> file that any of our developers with login access can change and which
> won't screw with attempts to contact the server otherwise.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Fiesty.  :)

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


from_name: Delirium

body:
Steve Vertigum wrote:

>     At least Im not preaching to the choir. :)
>
>     I have yet to see an direct response to my statements-- Rick said
>     "It's not from a questionable source" --(as if we were to accept
>     these numbers as gospel)  what utter crap is this? ...On the one
>     hand people argue 'there is no unquestionable source (its all
>     fine)-- there is no absolute NPOV. On the other hand they think
>     that an apartheid state is "not questionable."  (Its all fine.)
>     Then LD stated that 'if these numbers were from the Congo, he
>     wouldnt want them.' -- what standard is he using? What standard
>     are *you using?
>
>     I frankly dont care -- I raised the objections not because they
>     were popular, but because they were not. Nobody dealt with my
>     basic oppositon to using a bot to add these particular POV
>     statistics-- nobody could prove that they were accurate
>     --plenty of calls to "prove" that they were not. What utter nonsense.
>
>     But its irrelevant--All numbers be taken with a grain of salt,
>     right? Im afraid not-- the inclusion of these numbers sets a
>     precedent, where the WP takes a side in an ethnic dispute. When
>     edit wars do happen over these numbers, the use of a bot as an
>     "offical" WP-sanctioned body of data will hold weight disbalancing
>     any disputed terms. To say that this is not the case is heresy
>     against intelligence.
>
I suppose I'm not convinced, largely because I haven't heard any claims,
even from anti-Israeli groups, that their statistics are false.  There
are plenty of disputes over historical information, but the counts of
who, at this exact moment, is living in various cities in Israel seem to
be generally accepted (or at least I haven't been able to find any major
groups who dispute them).  In particular, the count of Arabs living in
Israel proper (i.e. not the territories) seem to be in line with
generally accepted facts--it's the issue of which Arabs *used* to live
in Israel and whether they should be allowed to return that's hotly
debated, not the issue of who lives there now.

-Mark


body:
--- Tucci <tucci528 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This discussion is kinda ridiculous.  I haven't read
> any of it until just now, when I read (or
> skimmed...)
> all of the Israeli bot articles in sequence.  One
> person is arguing that the Israeli government's
> statistics are too POV to include in the Wikipedia?
> Why?  It would be absolutely wonderful if there was
> some totally neutral organization out there that
> collected statistics on everything from how many
> Mozambiquean-Israeli-Christians there are in Tel
> Aviv
> to how many left-handed red-headed
> Norwegian-American
> biologists believe in creationism, but no such
> organization exists.  Luckily, we have adopted the
> NPOV policy, which does not require such an
> organization.  It only requires that potentially
> sensitive facts be attributed to the proper
> organization.  In this case, that organization
> appears
> to be the Israeli census bureau.  Hence, these
> potentially disputable statistics should be
> attributed
> to the organization that collected them.
>
> We're not talking about my brother's D+D group; the
> Israeli government is an organization with a lot of
> supporters, at home and abroad, who believe their
> numbers.  It would be POV to not include them.
>
> Just to let my own biases be known, I think all the
> Israelis and Palestinians should be sent to some
> useless corner of Mars where they can kill each
> other
> in peace (ironic, huh?), and all their territory
> converted to recycling plants or solar power cells
> or
> desalinization plants or, hell, a giant museum
> dedicated to people who think it's ever holy to kill
> other people (might have to use Syria too, cuz it'd
> be
> big).
>
> TUF-KAT

I think it's ridiculous too. It seems like Stevertigo
is the only person who opposes the statistics. I am
attempting to move the discussion to [[m:Israeli
statistics]].
LDan

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Not with a Bot (Izrae

body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is nonsense.  The information is not from a
> questionable source, the material is to be presented
> in a meaningful matter.  Your only objection is your
> unreasonable hatred for the Israeli government,
> which has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
> Unless someone has any objections other thatn
> Stevertigo, can we PLEASE end this and continue with
> discussing the merits of the BOT per se, and not the
> source of the material?
>
> RickK

I think all the objections to the content, layout,
etc. were resolved a while ago.
LDan

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body:
> > Okay, then what about thttpd (tiny/turbo/throttling http daemon)?
> >   http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
> > "In typical use it's about as fast as the best full-featured servers
> > (Apache, NCSA, Netscape). Under extreme load it's much faster."
> > It supports CGI, and IIRC you can configure PHP as a CGI interpreter, so
> > will it not work (possibly with a few minor changes) with MediaWiki?

Well, we could consider using thttpd for the CSS and images on
Wikipedia, but I'm not sure if it will provide that much more speed
(considering, at the very least, the CSS files are mmaped by Apache, and
the images and the CSS are cached by the clients.  It might make a
little difference, but I certainly don't think it would be worth the
effort.  If other people think differently, well, then, speak up...

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Just testing mail

body:
I'm not 100% sure the mail server is running right after the reboot.
Testing to the mailing list... please e-mail me directly if you don't get
this. ;)

-- brion


subject: [Wikitech-l] trying mailing list again

body: test... are we back up?


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing list again

body: grrr


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing mail server again

body: test test test


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists back up

body:
The process that actually delivers mail for the mailing lists didn't start
for some reason when the server was restarted, so while it was queueing up
every message sent to the list, it didn't send anything out or put
anything into the archives. :P

Back up now. Sigh...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] testing list again

body:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 06:55:09PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > grrr
>
> I'm not sure what the problem is?  My inbox has been rapidly filling
> with Brion mail all day.  :P

You didn't get them during the day, did you? They were all delivered in a
lump at 19:50 UTC or so, about 15 minutes before you wrote your message.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Future outage notes

body:
First, I sincerely hope the upcoming upgrades replace whatever part of
pliny is defective and has caused crashes regularly ever since we've had
the machine. (Unless it's software. Who knows?)

Second, a note: the wiki is designed to fall back onto cached pages if the
database server isn't available. *But*, often it ends up spending an
inordinate amount of time trying to talk to a server that isn't there, and
doesn't give up like it should.

A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings)
and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the
local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.

A clean, automated way to mark the server as Dead Dead Dead would probably
be good.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Future outage notes

body:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:51:08PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings)
> > and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the
> > local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
>
> Can we just change the IP address in /etc/hosts instead?

Well, we can change a configuration file that's owned by root and
affects a lot of system-wide things, or we can change a configuration
file that any of our developers with login access can change and which
won't screw with attempts to contact the server otherwise.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] testing list again

body:
I think I got all the 200 test emails. Brion, the server works :-)

Alfio

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:

>On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 06:55:09PM +0000, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> grrr
>
>I'm not sure what the problem is?  My inbox has been rapidly filling
>with Brion mail all day.  :P
>
>--
>Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
> Is there a reason we aren't using Apache 2? From a newbie's point of view,
> 2 is a bigger number than 1.3, so it must be better ;-). If the code is in
> PHP, how would a newer version of Apache break the code?

PHP runs within the Apache process. If Apache's broken, we're screwed. :)
Apache 2.0 isn't considered as 'mature' as 1.3; it's a major architectural
overhaul, and there are still many third-party modules that haven't been
ported. As far as I know mod_rewrite in 2.0 hasn't fixed the & problem, so
I'd have to port my workaround to work with it (something I haven't done
on my test server at home, which is running on Apache 2.0 -- but has
never been tested under load.)

> > Wild speculation is welcome, particularly with falsifiable hypotheses. :)
>
> Okay, then what about thttpd (tiny/turbo/throttling http daemon)?
>   http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
> "In typical use it's about as fast as the best full-featured servers
> (Apache, NCSA, Netscape). Under extreme load it's much faster."
> It supports CGI, and IIRC you can configure PHP as a CGI interpreter, so
> will it not work (possibly with a few minor changes) with MediaWiki?

Maybe for images and stylesheets it'd be fine, but that would not work at
all well for the dynamic pages. It would be a huge performance problem:
every single page view would require spawning a new PHP process, which
would have to open a new connection to the database.

Somebody's mentioned reverse proxies to offload slow transfers from
apache; someone else has mentioned lingerd which does roughly the same
thing more directly. That may or may not be useful; the lingerd docs
recommend also using a separate lightweight web server for styles, images
etc.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Text of proposed updated copyright notice

body:
Sorry that I am late to this debate. In Alex's proposal, I read

   "[...] you further affirm that such text is not defamatory or in
    violation of any law; [...]"

I strongly object to this language. I do not feel a moral
obligation to be bound by all laws, not even by all
laws I happen to know about or that apply to me. Also,
I am not capable to decide whether a given piece of
text violates any law, not even those laws I happen
to know about or that apply to me. I however do
feel a moral obligation to be honest, which would therefore
preclude me from affirming the above.

Axel

P.S. Minor point: presumably there are or have been laws
against defamation somewhere, so it is not necessary to
mention defamation specifically.

__________________________________
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from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 04:20, Arno Peters wrote:
> Could we see the output of netstat, particularly the number of closing
> connections.

Here's the breakdown of the connection statuses for connections to port
80 on larousse a couple minutes ago:

TIME_WAIT: 320
ESTABLISHED: 46
FIN_WAIT2: 35
SYN_RECV: 7
FIN_WAIT1: 4
CLOSE_WAIT: 3
LAST_ACK: 1

On pliny:
TIME_WAIT: 312
FIN_WAIT2: 50
ESTABLISHED: 48
FIN_WAIT1: 5
SYN_RECV: 3
CLOSE_WAIT: 3
CLOSING: 2
LAST_ACK: 1

It's not infrequent to have several connections from a single client IP.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.cmo)


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177

body:
> Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:49:51 -0400
> From: rednblack at alum.mit.edu
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org

> Hi,
>
> I've been fighting for roughly the past half-day
> with 142.177.*.* (formerly
> 24.*.*.* and EntmootsOfTrolls) over [[Islamism]] and
> [[militant Islam]]. I
> must admit that I'm not really a very patient
> person, especially when the other
> party is not at all willing to engage, refuses to
> respond to my points, and
> is only interested in pushing his idiosyncratic
> viewpoint. It's even more
> irritating when the user has been hard-banned
> several times, and writes totally
> terrible, unfocused and irrelevant crap on top of
> everything else.
>
> So, I'd like some advice on how to deal with this
> situation.
>
> See [[Talk:Islamism]], [[Talk:Militant
> Islam/Delete]], and [[Wikipedia:Problem
> users]], where he listed myself and RK after I asked
> to have [[Islamism]]
> protected, for discussion. I'll admit my bias: I
> wrote most of [[Islamism]],
> and while it isn't perfect and needs a whole lot of
> work, I feel that the
> changes 142 is making are totally inappropriate.
>
> Saurabh (Graft)

Your issue with 142 is - imho - a perfectly classical
edit war, with two different sets of opinions,
yours/RK versus 142.

I can't help but take with a grain of salt the issue
you raise above, with the fact you listed [[Militant
Islam]] for deletion just after RK redirected it with
justifications which were not convincing.

I know little of the topic (though, as you may know
about 10% of the french population is of muslim
religion, and we have our share of religious
extremism), so when you listed it on vfd, I just asked
you whether the issue was that the term did not
existed at all, or whether you thought the content was
wrong.

Your answer to my question was

"The concept does not exist, as even the article
admits, and so the article should be deleted. It's
like having an article called militant Christianity?,
and listing all the Christians who have ever been
violent and employed Christian rhetoric to support
themselves. We could do it, but what would be the
point? The only common thread is that they're militant
and Christian... why not start an article on Blond
Presidents?? or Atheist Right-Fielders??"

When I looked at the two terms, both existed (militant
islamist has over 34200 hits on google). This was
confirmed by Jt who said

"It is certainly a real term, one I have heard widely
used in academia, in the media and in politics,
whereas Islamism is not a term I have used much
outside the US and Israel. And yes there should be an
article on Militant Christianity? as it too is a real
term describing Christian fundamentalists who believe
that they are fighting a 'war for Christ' and that
violence is a necessary means in that war, in areas
like abortion, homosexuality, anti-semitism,
secularism, etc."

For those interested, read
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Militant_Islam/Delete

Obviously, though you share opinion with RK that the
concept does not exist and think that the article
should disappear, it seems that others have another
opinion. And that not only does the concept exists,
but that also it is relevant and informative for
readers. I do think it is quite reasonable to think
that on these types of matters, we cannot expect that
everyone agrees.

Hence, it is not a question of banning or
idiosynchrasy, or such, it is just a matter of
diversity of opinion and perception. Just the essence
of Wikipedia, not a personal matter. Accepting that
other people have different opinions, no matter how
much total crap it appears to us.

In this, the fact you loudly claimed the concept and
the word did not exist, while obviously the word
exist, and Jt opinion is that the concept exist and is
important, should be proof enough that we sometimes
are wrong. Nothing to be ashamed for, if we knew
everything, we would not need wikipedia.

You also openly admit your own bias and the fact you
wrote alone most of the Islamism article.
Perhaps then, would it be good to imagine that *one*
person cannot know everything on a topic and that it
would make sense that such a wide topic be worked on
by more people than just a couple

Whatever the effort you will put to be at your best in
terms of neutrality and completude, do you think you
would ever be able to "think" and see things like a
"fou de Dieu" is (You certainly have a term for these
people, those seeing God as a mean and an end, and
revolving every matter in their life around Him)?.

I understand very well you may think 142 is writing
inappropriate things. This is what we think each time
we have an edit war with someone. Each time we
disagree and get hot over it.

The only thing I can think of to help you here, is to
remind you that we are all different, and ever will
be, and each day I read the english wikipedia, I see
that and am amazed.
Also, to focus on the content, and not to divert your
thinking in the dear hope to see someone you disagree
with be banned, because if an opinion is serious and
relevant, it will come back by the back door. Hence, I
would say to face this issue rather than trying to
avoid it.
And if need there is, to choose a neutral party to
help you (given that RK who will certainly be in the
discussion, is not a neutral party :-))

And...yes...just to give you my opinion on the
islamism article. It is good and informative. But
biased.

When I read the below paragraph

"Much Islamist activity since has been directed
against governments in Muslim societies, which
Islamists oppose because they are governments
according to human law, not divine law. However, a
considerable effort has been made to fight Western
targets, especially the United States. The United
States in particular is a subject of Islamist ire
because of its support of Israel, its presence on
sacred Saudi soil, what Islamists regard as its
aggression against Muslims in Iraq, and its support of
the regimes Islamists oppose. In addition some
Islamists have concentrated their activity against
Israel, and nearly all Islamists view Israel with
hostility. Osama bin Laden, at least, believes that
this is of necessity due to historical conflict
between Muslims and Jews, and considers there to be a
Jewish/American alliance against Islam. "

I cannot help repressing a sad smile, and think of all
the difficulties my country has in integrating muslim
population, some of it being islamist, of how much
infrastructure was destroyed in the past years by
attacks, how many people died in my country during
these religious battles, of how many euros were spent
in rebuilding, of all the discussions over the FIS in
Algeria, of the islamists in Marocco, Egypt, Jordan
trying to have their voice heard through legal means.

The current article is informative, but it does not
answer my questions, and does not help me to
understand why from time to time women and children
die when in Paris subway, or when they go shopping for
presents around Christmas. It does not help me to
understand why, from time to time, I can't park my car
in front of my children school because the terrorist
alert is on again. It does not help me to understand
why recently a teenager has burned alive a young girl
refusing to cover her head in one of our cities. Or
why some people get wild at the though of their wife
head naked on identity pictures. It does not help me
to understand why some french people refuse islamic
religious cult building in their town. It does not
help me to understand just why some people are so
extremists when muslim people may be so delightful.

And if anyone read french here, I invite them to read
this speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy over french
muslims

http://www.religioscope.info/article_143.shtml

I dunno where you are from, Graft (America I suppose)
and I dunno what your relationship with islam and
muslims is, I can just say the current article needs
work and other perspectives than yours and RK. Because
right now, if I look at the article history, I see
that you two are basically the authors of this
article.
Steve was censored right ?

I suspect an article on islamism, reflecting all
points of view (per Wikipedia goal) should not be
restricted to a "two head american authorship".

If you want the world to read this article with the
feeling it is fair and deeply informative, or if you
want american people to better understand why they
have suffered such a terrible loss, please do not
cling to that article. Rather try to understand and
acknowledge other views. Please Graft.

Anthere

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from_name: Dante Alighieri

body:
At 04:25 PM 9/18/2003, you wrote:

>And Senor Dante-- who were you shutting up?
>
>~S~

I'm not shutting anyone up, I'm politely asking people to shut up. The
people of whom I'm making that request are those who see fit to flood the
mailing list with a superfluity of postings about an issue that really (at
this point) belongs on a talk page or the meta and not in the list.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l sigh, 142.177

body:
> From: rednblack at alum.mit.edu
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org

>First of all, my opinions and RK's are wildly
>divergent.

Though they converge as for reverting :-)

>As to the current Islamism article, it was a
>replacement of RK's previous version, which stevert
>was fighting with him over. I don't think steve has
>stepped in since then much, maybe because he finds
the >current version more satisfactory, or maybe
because he >grew bored with the article.

This is him to say.

>My objection to 142 is not over content, but rather
>this:

>142 decided that "Islamism" was not a neutral term. I
>don't know why he decided this, because he never
>bothered to respond to my queries on that point.
>Thereafter he hacked up the Islamism article and
moved >chunks of text around unilaterally. My debate
with him >over "militant Islam" notwithstanding, this
is hardly >acceptable practice.

Oh Graft, I must respectfully say that it is quite
often done a practice, though it is here done in a
bolder way that done usually.
Everyone, one day or another, is bold to the point of
what can be perceived as rudeness.
Just today, I did some moving around on the french
wikipedia, on this summer heat wave article, that was
felt as too bold by one of the author. Us being in
good relationship, he gently told me I disturbed him.

You also were very bold with me once. I spent many
hours writing a - imho - well researched, informative
and attributed article. But I did not write everything
that was to say on the topic ("always leave something
obvious to add..."). You then explained to me on the
talk page that while the article was obviously lacking
some aspects, I should also *drastically* reduce what
I wrote.

You also added "I agree the trading issues might be
very important for you europeans, and maybe even for
us americans, but they are not, by far, the only
important factor surrounding GM food."

As you say, the trading issues are very important to
us Europeans; I would even dare say essential. Kat
confirmed it was very important in saying "The trade
aspect is a major source of frustration for U.S.
farmers who see export markets close to them whether
the individual farmer should choose to grow GMO grain
or not. A discussion of GM food would be incomplete
without it."

The fact it was only one factor, and apparently not
very important, was only an opinion of *you*. And the
fact some of the other factors were missing was not an
argument to remove half of my article, but rather for
someone to complete the parts missing.

If I did it very in-depth, it was because I am aware
of the depth of lack of understanding american people
have over why europeans had a moratorium. This - imho
- required precisions.

But anyway, in short, we were two people supporting
keeping the article as such. You were alone stating it
should not, and saying I should drastically cut in
what I wrote for it was not being very important.

The next thing I knew, you had amputated the article,
and moved the whole part that did not suit you, with
no consideration of my own position, with no
acknowledgment of who had written the whole bit, and
with no fixing both articles properly to introduce the
notions covered in the other article.

basically, this is called a consensual agreement with
the 33% winning the case.
This is also "moving chunks of text around
unilaterally."

Notice, I don't hold bad feelings toward you for
having done that, though I was unhappy of that, but
again, respectfully, I must insist that boldness
happens, and does not necessarily lead to an edit war
or asking protection.

>Understand that my dispute with 142 is not an
>ideological one. My dispute is over the
>style in which 142 operates. He took an existing
>article, rewrote it willy-nilly with
>little justification, got in two edit wars over it
>(with myself and RK, who have little
>ideological common ground), then listed us both on
>[[Wikipedia:Problem users]] and
>went ahead with other reorganizations and
>article-creations without any discussion.

It is very unfortunate you got in an edit war with
hir.
I would not hold getting in an edit war with RK as
being very...err...well...never mind.

As for being listed on problem users, I would not mind
that too much if I were you. People who know you are
confident you are ok. I hope it did not spoil your
best day too much :-)

Thought : Aoineko and I often list each other on
problematic users on the fr :-)

>I am unclear exactly in what ways the current
>"Islamism" article is not neutral, and
>I am uncertain how it could incorporate such inchoate
>notions as "why?" people become
>radicals of any stripe. I think the article does
>attempt to give SOME answer as to how
>people are pushed into increasingly radical
directions >(although there's no discussion
>of Algeria/France right now, which is a major flaw.

But does it give these people point of view on how
they perceive themselves, what they think as being
said extremists ?
Does it describe in which way, the so-said non
extremists perceive them as extremists ?

>Unfortunately I know little to nothing about it/them,
>so maybe you can fill in the >gaps?)

Thank you very much for your trust, but I am not
currently willing to be called a vandal again :-)

>I readily acknowledge that the current "Islamism"
>article has profound failings and needs
>a lot of work; I also acknowledge that I am not an
>expert on Islamism, just a guy who has
>read a few books on the subject. I have no problem
>with more knowledgable people improving
>the article.

You already did a good work. The point is not
necessarily "more knowledgable" people, but rather
"other knowledgeable" people. Look, I never read any
books on islamism, so you probably know more than I on
 some points. But did your father ever received a
letter from one asking for your hand when you were 15
? :-)

>Anyway, I suppose it's time to retreat into the camp
>of people who have been bitten by 24/142/Entmoots and
>just have to learn to live with it.

>Saurabh

Live with it, yes. Retreat, perhaps not :-) Dunno.

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body:
--- Axel Boldt <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
>    "[...] you further affirm that such text is not
> defamatory or in
>     violation of any law; [...]"
>
> I strongly object to this language. I do not feel a
> moral
> obligation to be bound by all laws, not even by all
> laws I happen to know about or that apply to me.
> Also,
> I am not capable to decide whether a given piece of
> text violates any law, not even those laws I happen
> to know about or that apply to me. I however do
> feel a moral obligation to be honest, which would
> therefore
> preclude me from affirming the above.

It would be nice if the lawyers would make it clear
that the legalese is not so much designed to restrict
our humanity as it is to restrict the scope and
severity of potential lawsuits.

It would be nice if they could make that clear, but it
would seem that they cant explicity stipulate that
such legalese should rightly be taken with a big
[[grain of salt]]--- so thus the rest of us are left
to babble in plain English such layman distinctions,
and never actully bridging the gap--with the exception
of the use of arcane smoke signals and an occasional
Navaho codeword.

~S~
 "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the
illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive with our frail
and feeble mind." - Albert Einstein

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subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177

body:
First of all, my opinions and RK's are wildly divergent. As to the current Islamism
article, it was a replacement of RK's previous version, which stevert was fighting
with him over. I don't think steve has stepped in since then much, maybe because he
finds the current version more satisfactory, or maybe because he grew bored with the
article.

My objection to 142 is not over content, but rather this:

142 decided that "Islamism" was not a neutral term. I don't know why he decided
this, because he never bothered to respond to my queries on that point. Thereafter
he hacked up the Islamism article and moved chunks of text around unilaterally. My
debate with him over "militant Islam" notwithstanding, this is hardly acceptable
practice.

Understand that my dispute with 142 is not an ideological one. My dispute is over the
style in which 142 operates. He took an existing article, rewrote it willy-nilly with
little justification, got in two edit wars over it (with myself and RK, who have little
ideological common ground), then listed us both on [[Wikipedia:Problem users]] and
went ahead with other reorganizations and article-creations without any discussion.

I am unclear exactly in what ways the current "Islamism" article is not neutral, and
I am uncertain how it could incorporate such inchoate notions as "why?" people become
radicals of any stripe. I think the article does attempt to give SOME answer as to how
people are pushed into increasingly radical directions (although there's no discussion
of Algeria/France right now, which is a major flaw. Unfortunately I know little to
nothing about it/them, so maybe you can fill in the gaps?)

I readily acknowledge that the current "Islamism" article has profound failings and needs
a lot of work; I also acknowledge that I am not an expert on Islamism, just a guy who has
read a few books on the subject. I have no problem with more knowledgable people improving
the article.

Anyway, I suppose it's time to retreat into the camp of people who have been bitten by
24/142/Entmoots and just have to learn to live with it.

Saurabh

------
Living in this country will always be hell until people stop demanding that
the state imprison their neighbors.

In message <20030919151618.21337.qmail at web41703.mail.yahoo.com>, Anthere said:
>> Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 14:49:51 -0400
>> From: rednblack at alum.mit.edu
>> Subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177
>> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been fighting for roughly the past half-day
>> with 142.177.*.* (formerly
>> 24.*.*.* and EntmootsOfTrolls) over [[Islamism]] and
>> [[militant Islam]]. I
>> must admit that I'm not really a very patient
>> person, especially when the other
>> party is not at all willing to engage, refuses to
>> respond to my points, and
>> is only interested in pushing his idiosyncratic
>> viewpoint. It's even more
>> irritating when the user has been hard-banned
>> several times, and writes totally
>> terrible, unfocused and irrelevant crap on top of
>> everything else.
>>
>> So, I'd like some advice on how to deal with this
>> situation.
>>
>> See [[Talk:Islamism]], [[Talk:Militant
>> Islam/Delete]], and [[Wikipedia:Problem
>> users]], where he listed myself and RK after I asked
>> to have [[Islamism]]
>> protected, for discussion. I'll admit my bias: I
>> wrote most of [[Islamism]],
>> and while it isn't perfect and needs a whole lot of
>> work, I feel that the
>> changes 142 is making are totally inappropriate.
>>
>> Saurabh (Graft)
>
>Your issue with 142 is - imho - a perfectly classical
>edit war, with two different sets of opinions,
>yours/RK versus 142.
>
>I can't help but take with a grain of salt the issue
>you raise above, with the fact you listed [[Militant
>Islam]] for deletion just after RK redirected it with
>justifications which were not convincing.
>
>I know little of the topic (though, as you may know
>about 10% of the french population is of muslim
>religion, and we have our share of religious
>extremism), so when you listed it on vfd, I just asked
>you whether the issue was that the term did not
>existed at all, or whether you thought the content was
>wrong.
>
>Your answer to my question was
>
>"The concept does not exist, as even the article
>admits, and so the article should be deleted. It's
>like having an article called militant Christianity?,
>and listing all the Christians who have ever been
>violent and employed Christian rhetoric to support
>themselves. We could do it, but what would be the
>point? The only common thread is that they're militant
>and Christian... why not start an article on Blond
>Presidents?? or Atheist Right-Fielders??"
>
>When I looked at the two terms, both existed (militant
>islamist has over 34200 hits on google). This was
>confirmed by Jt who said
>
>"It is certainly a real term, one I have heard widely
>used in academia, in the media and in politics,
>whereas Islamism is not a term I have used much
>outside the US and Israel. And yes there should be an
>article on Militant Christianity? as it too is a real
>term describing Christian fundamentalists who believe
>that they are fighting a 'war for Christ' and that
>violence is a necessary means in that war, in areas
>like abortion, homosexuality, anti-semitism,
>secularism, etc."
>
>For those interested, read
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Militant_Islam/Delete
>
>Obviously, though you share opinion with RK that the
>concept does not exist and think that the article
>should disappear, it seems that others have another
>opinion. And that not only does the concept exists,
>but that also it is relevant and informative for
>readers. I do think it is quite reasonable to think
>that on these types of matters, we cannot expect that
>everyone agrees.
>
>Hence, it is not a question of banning or
>idiosynchrasy, or such, it is just a matter of
>diversity of opinion and perception. Just the essence
>of Wikipedia, not a personal matter. Accepting that
>other people have different opinions, no matter how
>much total crap it appears to us.
>
>In this, the fact you loudly claimed the concept and
>the word did not exist, while obviously the word
>exist, and Jt opinion is that the concept exist and is
>important, should be proof enough that we sometimes
>are wrong. Nothing to be ashamed for, if we knew
>everything, we would not need wikipedia.
>
>You also openly admit your own bias and the fact you
>wrote alone most of the Islamism article.
>Perhaps then, would it be good to imagine that *one*
>person cannot know everything on a topic and that it
>would make sense that such a wide topic be worked on
>by more people than just a couple
>
>Whatever the effort you will put to be at your best in
>terms of neutrality and completude, do you think you
>would ever be able to "think" and see things like a
>"fou de Dieu" is (You certainly have a term for these
>people, those seeing God as a mean and an end, and
>revolving every matter in their life around Him)?.
>
>I understand very well you may think 142 is writing
>inappropriate things. This is what we think each time
>we have an edit war with someone. Each time we
>disagree and get hot over it.
>
>The only thing I can think of to help you here, is to
>remind you that we are all different, and ever will
>be, and each day I read the english wikipedia, I see
>that and am amazed.
>Also, to focus on the content, and not to divert your
>thinking in the dear hope to see someone you disagree
>with be banned, because if an opinion is serious and
>relevant, it will come back by the back door. Hence, I
>would say to face this issue rather than trying to
>avoid it.
>And if need there is, to choose a neutral party to
>help you (given that RK who will certainly be in the
>discussion, is not a neutral party :-))
>
>And...yes...just to give you my opinion on the
>islamism article. It is good and informative. But
>biased.
>
>When I read the below paragraph
>
>"Much Islamist activity since has been directed
>against governments in Muslim societies, which
>Islamists oppose because they are governments
>according to human law, not divine law. However, a
>considerable effort has been made to fight Western
>targets, especially the United States. The United
>States in particular is a subject of Islamist ire
>because of its support of Israel, its presence on
>sacred Saudi soil, what Islamists regard as its
>aggression against Muslims in Iraq, and its support of
>the regimes Islamists oppose. In addition some
>Islamists have concentrated their activity against
>Israel, and nearly all Islamists view Israel with
>hostility. Osama bin Laden, at least, believes that
>this is of necessity due to historical conflict
>between Muslims and Jews, and considers there to be a
>Jewish/American alliance against Islam. "
>
>I cannot help repressing a sad smile, and think of all
>the difficulties my country has in integrating muslim
>population, some of it being islamist, of how much
>infrastructure was destroyed in the past years by
>attacks, how many people died in my country during
>these religious battles, of how many euros were spent
>in rebuilding, of all the discussions over the FIS in
>Algeria, of the islamists in Marocco, Egypt, Jordan
>trying to have their voice heard through legal means.
>
>The current article is informative, but it does not
>answer my questions, and does not help me to
>understand why from time to time women and children
>die when in Paris subway, or when they go shopping for
>presents around Christmas. It does not help me to
>understand why, from time to time, I can't park my car
>in front of my children school because the terrorist
>alert is on again. It does not help me to understand
>why recently a teenager has burned alive a young girl
>refusing to cover her head in one of our cities. Or
>why some people get wild at the though of their wife
>head naked on identity pictures. It does not help me
>to understand why some french people refuse islamic
>religious cult building in their town. It does not
>help me to understand just why some people are so
>extremists when muslim people may be so delightful.
>
>And if anyone read french here, I invite them to read
>this speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy over french
>muslims
>
>http://www.religioscope.info/article_143.shtml
>
>I dunno where you are from, Graft (America I suppose)
>and I dunno what your relationship with islam and
>muslims is, I can just say the current article needs
>work and other perspectives than yours and RK. Because
>right now, if I look at the article history, I see
>that you two are basically the authors of this
>article.
>Steve was censored right ?
>
>I suspect an article on islamism, reflecting all
>points of view (per Wikipedia goal) should not be
>restricted to a "two head american authorship".
>
>If you want the world to read this article with the
>feeling it is fair and deeply informative, or if you
>want american people to better understand why they
>have suffered such a terrible loss, please do not
>cling to that article. Rather try to understand and
>acknowledge other views. Please Graft.
>
>Anthere
>
>__________________________________
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>


body:
--- Axel Boldt <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Sorry that I am late to this debate. In Alex's
> proposal, I read
>
>    "[...] you further affirm that such text is not
> defamatory or in
>     violation of any law; [...]"
>
> I strongly object to this language. I do not feel a
> moral
> obligation to be bound by all laws, not even by all
> laws I happen to know about or that apply to me.
> Also,
> I am not capable to decide whether a given piece of
> text violates any law, not even those laws I happen
> to know about or that apply to me. I however do
> feel a moral obligation to be honest, which would
> therefore
> preclude me from affirming the above.
>
> Axel
>
> P.S. Minor point: presumably there are or have been
> laws
> against defamation somewhere, so it is not necessary
> to
> mention defamation specifically.

That's a good point, now that you mention it. In
general, Alex's proposal sounds too much like the
legalese that no one reads and most websites come
with.  Wikipedia is a wiki, so because of its dynamic
nature and social pressures, I don't think we need any
legalese in order to submit stuff; just in plain
English that you're licensing it under the GNU FDL and
that, if someone else wrote it, they gave you
permission to licence it that way. It's kind of
implied that you can't break the law on wikipedia. You
can't break the law off wikipedia, but you don't have
to read a paragraph of legalese every hour to make
sure that you don't. And you ARE allowed defame people
in a legal way (ie. not liebel), and we shouldn't make
additional laws. We're loosing sight of the original
concept of a wiki: no hard-bound rules and contracts,
just social pressure and the dynamic nature of a wiki.

LDan

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Future outage notes

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> First, I sincerely hope the upcoming upgrades replace whatever part of
> pliny is defective and has caused crashes regularly ever since we've had
> the machine. (Unless it's software. Who knows?)
>
> Second, a note: the wiki is designed to fall back onto cached pages if the
> database server isn't available. *But*, often it ends up spending an
> inordinate amount of time trying to talk to a server that isn't there, and
> doesn't give up like it should.
>
> A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings)
> and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the
> local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
>
> A clean, automated way to mark the server as Dead Dead Dead would probably
> be good.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Thanks for that info Brion, I was wondering how to do that. Given
another half an hour I probably would have worked it out for myself, but
the middle of a server crash is probably not the best time to be
browsing through DatabaseFunctions.php trying to decipher code.

Better than an automated way to mark servers dead: database replication.
Maybe if I say it often enough it will just magically materialise :)

Alright, maybe magic materialisation is unlikely. How about I start
converting the PHP code to use two separate sets of DB functions, one
for reading and one for writing? I believe that's a necessary
precondition for replication.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] bug? language mislink

body:
See Wikipedia:FAQ -> hungarian interlanguage link. it links to the correct
page, but reaches nirvana.

It may be related to the messup between hu.wikipedia.org's Wikipedia vs.
Wikip?dia namespaces, but haven't seen such clash so far. Seems "normal"
works, URI-encoded doesn't.

cya,
grin


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 draws near...

body:
tarquin wrote on Wikipedia-l
>Please wait until we have our logo decided

The end of the final vote is on the 25th, I'm sure we
can have the new logo up by the time the first press
releases are distributed on the 29th. If not then we
can wait a few days (or even wait two months for the
more conservative 300,000 alternate article count.
See:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesTotalAlt.htm
).

>& a clearer page layout!

? Which page? The meta version of the press release is
just that; a nice and tidy English version will be
created from that and it will be posted on the English
Wikipedia. I suggest that every Wikipedia host their
version of the press release on their own wiki so as
not to confuse people into thinking that meta is a
Wikipedia.

>Everybody stop writing articles now!!!!!!!!!!! ;)

That's not going to happen unless we implement
Nupedia-style editorial controls or pull the plug on
the server. ;)

Things that, IMO, have to be done before we distribute
the press release:

1)
http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html
needs to be finalized by the community and approved by
Jimbo.
2) Fundraising.html needs to be displayed at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising/
3) http://wikiquote.org and http://wikiquote.com need
to be forwarded to http://quote.wikipedia.org
4) A minimal webpage needs to be created for the
Wikimedia Foundation and displayed at
http://wikimediafoundation.org (http://wikimedia.org
should continue to be a portal to the different
Wikimedia projects; the only change that is needed is
a link to the foundation's website).

Things that would be real nice but not absolutely
necessary, IMO:

1) Upgrade Pliny (our webserver) and Larousse (our
database server). I'm tempted to move this item up...
2) Translated/different language versions of
Fundraising.html created.
3) Move Wikibooks to http://wikibooks.org
4) Move Wikiquote to http://wikiquote.org
5) Either revive Nupedia.org (the website) or remove
all mention of it from the Wikimedia.org page. We will
still have to decide what to do with this comatose
project. But not today.

Lower priority (mainly symbolic but still important in
the long run, IMO):

1) Move meta to http://meta.wikimedia.org (temp
Wikimedia logo needed)
2) Move the mailing lists to http://mail.wikimedia.org
3) Move the database download page to
http://download.wikimedia.org
4) Move the test wiki to http://test.wikimedia.org
5) Move the English Wikipedia to
http://en.wikipedia.org and create a language
selection portal at http://wikipedia.org (I know, way
too much work for a week for little real immediate
benefit; that's why these items are marked "lower
priority").

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Related links:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%27s_first_press_release
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Fundraising.html

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from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 draws near...

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>We are also getting real close to the 300,000 article
>milestone
>
>What say you?
>
>
Please wait until we have our logo decided & a clearer page layout!
Everybody stop writing articles now!!!!!!!!!!! ;)

tarquin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l sigh, 142.177

body:
Well, p'raps you're right. Anyhow, the day is too long in the end, and the
opportunities for fights too many... I'm done with this one. I'm going to have
a wonderful evening now, and I hope you will as well.

Saurabh

------
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women... It is about a
socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their
husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and
become Lesbians." - Pat Robertson

In message <20030919175747.19733.qmail at web41702.mail.yahoo.com>, Anthere said:
>> From: rednblack at alum.mit.edu
>> Subject: [WikiEN-l] sigh, 142.177
>> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>
>>First of all, my opinions and RK's are wildly
>>divergent.
>
>Though they converge as for reverting :-)
>
>>As to the current Islamism article, it was a
>>replacement of RK's previous version, which stevert
>>was fighting with him over. I don't think steve has
>>stepped in since then much, maybe because he finds
>the >current version more satisfactory, or maybe
>because he >grew bored with the article.
>
>This is him to say.
>
>>My objection to 142 is not over content, but rather
>>this:
>
>>142 decided that "Islamism" was not a neutral term. I
>>don't know why he decided this, because he never
>>bothered to respond to my queries on that point.
>>Thereafter he hacked up the Islamism article and
>moved >chunks of text around unilaterally. My debate
>with him >over "militant Islam" notwithstanding, this
>is hardly >acceptable practice.
>
>Oh Graft, I must respectfully say that it is quite
>often done a practice, though it is here done in a
>bolder way that done usually.
>Everyone, one day or another, is bold to the point of
>what can be perceived as rudeness.
>Just today, I did some moving around on the french
>wikipedia, on this summer heat wave article, that was
>felt as too bold by one of the author. Us being in
>good relationship, he gently told me I disturbed him.
>
>You also were very bold with me once. I spent many
>hours writing a - imho - well researched, informative
>and attributed article. But I did not write everything
>that was to say on the topic ("always leave something
>obvious to add..."). You then explained to me on the
>talk page that while the article was obviously lacking
>some aspects, I should also *drastically* reduce what
>I wrote.
>
>You also added "I agree the trading issues might be
>very important for you europeans, and maybe even for
>us americans, but they are not, by far, the only
>important factor surrounding GM food."
>
>As you say, the trading issues are very important to
>us Europeans; I would even dare say essential. Kat
>confirmed it was very important in saying "The trade
>aspect is a major source of frustration for U.S.
>farmers who see export markets close to them whether
>the individual farmer should choose to grow GMO grain
>or not. A discussion of GM food would be incomplete
>without it."
>
>The fact it was only one factor, and apparently not
>very important, was only an opinion of *you*. And the
>fact some of the other factors were missing was not an
>argument to remove half of my article, but rather for
>someone to complete the parts missing.
>
>If I did it very in-depth, it was because I am aware
>of the depth of lack of understanding american people
>have over why europeans had a moratorium. This - imho
>- required precisions.
>
>But anyway, in short, we were two people supporting
>keeping the article as such. You were alone stating it
>should not, and saying I should drastically cut in
>what I wrote for it was not being very important.
>
>The next thing I knew, you had amputated the article,
>and moved the whole part that did not suit you, with
>no consideration of my own position, with no
>acknowledgment of who had written the whole bit, and
>with no fixing both articles properly to introduce the
>notions covered in the other article.
>
>basically, this is called a consensual agreement with
>the 33% winning the case.
>This is also "moving chunks of text around
>unilaterally."
>
>Notice, I don't hold bad feelings toward you for
>having done that, though I was unhappy of that, but
>again, respectfully, I must insist that boldness
>happens, and does not necessarily lead to an edit war
>or asking protection.
>
>>Understand that my dispute with 142 is not an
>>ideological one. My dispute is over the
>>style in which 142 operates. He took an existing
>>article, rewrote it willy-nilly with
>>little justification, got in two edit wars over it
>>(with myself and RK, who have little
>>ideological common ground), then listed us both on
>>[[Wikipedia:Problem users]] and
>>went ahead with other reorganizations and
>>article-creations without any discussion.
>
>It is very unfortunate you got in an edit war with
>hir.
>I would not hold getting in an edit war with RK as
>being very...err...well...never mind.
>
>As for being listed on problem users, I would not mind
>that too much if I were you. People who know you are
>confident you are ok. I hope it did not spoil your
>best day too much :-)
>
>Thought : Aoineko and I often list each other on
>problematic users on the fr :-)
>
>>I am unclear exactly in what ways the current
>>"Islamism" article is not neutral, and
>>I am uncertain how it could incorporate such inchoate
>>notions as "why?" people become
>>radicals of any stripe. I think the article does
>>attempt to give SOME answer as to how
>>people are pushed into increasingly radical
>directions >(although there's no discussion
>>of Algeria/France right now, which is a major flaw.
>
>But does it give these people point of view on how
>they perceive themselves, what they think as being
>said extremists ?
>Does it describe in which way, the so-said non
>extremists perceive them as extremists ?
>
>>Unfortunately I know little to nothing about it/them,
>>so maybe you can fill in the >gaps?)
>
>Thank you very much for your trust, but I am not
>currently willing to be called a vandal again :-)
>
>>I readily acknowledge that the current "Islamism"
>>article has profound failings and needs
>>a lot of work; I also acknowledge that I am not an
>>expert on Islamism, just a guy who has
>>read a few books on the subject. I have no problem
>>with more knowledgable people improving
>>the article.
>
>You already did a good work. The point is not
>necessarily "more knowledgable" people, but rather
>"other knowledgeable" people. Look, I never read any
>books on islamism, so you probably know more than I on
> some points. But did your father ever received a
>letter from one asking for your hand when you were 15
>? :-)
>
>>Anyway, I suppose it's time to retreat into the camp
>>of people who have been bitten by 24/142/Entmoots and
>>just have to learn to live with it.
>
>>Saurabh
>
>Live with it, yes. Retreat, perhaps not :-) Dunno.
>
>
>__________________________________
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>Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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>


from_name: Adam Raizen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Finishing up about the damn bot

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> --- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>This is nonsense.  The information is not from a
>>questionable source, the material is to be presented
>>in a meaningful matter.  Your only objection is your
>>unreasonable hatred for the Israeli government,
>>which has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
>>Unless someone has any objections other thatn
>>Stevertigo, can we PLEASE end this and continue with
>>discussing the merits of the BOT per se, and not the
>>source of the material?
>>
>>RickK
>
>
> I think all the objections to the content, layout,
> etc. were resolved a while ago.
> LDan

Okay, since discussion seems to have been exhausted and 7 or 8 people
are in favor and 1 against, can User:IsraBot on both en.wikipedia and
he.wikipedia be given bot status? I should get a chance to start it
running tomorrow evening.

--Adam Raizen


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Interlanguage links on the CA WP

body:
Popped over to the Catalan Wikipedia to see if I could find an article that
[[en:Catalan Countries]] should be linked to there... noticed that
interlanguage links show as plain text there, for example, the top of
[[ca:Geografia]] looks like:

[[da:Geografi]] [[de:Geographie]] [[en:geography]] [[eo:Geografio]]
[[es:Geograf?a]] [[fr:G?ographie]] [[nl:Geografie]] [[pl:Geografia]]
Ci?ncies > Geografia

... in normal viewing.

-- Jake


body:
On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 19:15, Jake Nelson wrote:
> Popped over to the Catalan Wikipedia to see if I could find an article that
> [[en:Catalan Countries]] should be linked to there... noticed that
> interlanguage links show as plain text there,

Still on the old software.

The conversion from old to new software is not done yet, I'm trying to
do many many things, and no one else has popped up and said "I'll do
it!"

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Break

body:
On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 07:41, K Forstner wrote:
> Wikipedia actually forces me to take an indefinite break until the whole
> thing is running properly again. A couple of days ago, I wikified a long
> page and for once forgot to copy it before pressing the "save" button.
> Needless to say, the whole thing was lost irrevocably before I had realized
> my mistake. Yesterday I was careless again and added five titles to
> Kingturtle's reading list -- lost forever. Now I just wanted to update a
> page -- impossible.
>
> I'm still amazed that this is not being discussed.

You're obviously not reading the same barrels and barrels of complaints
I am. :)

There's been some more concrete discussion on wikitech-l, the
developers' list. If you can give actual useful advice based on
experience running high-load web servers, then please do.

We *know* it's slow. Everyone here knows it's slow, and posting about
the fact that it's slow is not going to shock us into flipping the magic
"don't be slow" switch, because there just isn't such a switch.

Hardware upgrades (new processors, _much_ faster for the web server, and
more memory which can be devoted to caching data to avoid hitting the
db/disk so much) have been ordered and should be installed next week.

If you have real, useful ideas on improving the efficiency of our setup,
or better yet can code up improvements and submit patches to the
software, then *please please please* join wikitech-l and get a-postin'.
For those that just want to bitch about how slow the server is, may I
direct you to our IRC channel: #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mailing list management: like pulling teeth,
	only you're the teeth

body:
In between versions of mailman they changed the way that the process
that delivers mail gets run; it used to be run from cron, now it's a
continuous process that you have to start separately.

When we upgraded mailman a while back, it looks like the command to
start it didn't quite make it into the startup scripts. I'm pretty sure
I've got it right in /etc/rc.local now, so when the machine gets next
rebooted (for hardware upgrades, knock on wood), the mailing lists
_shouldn't_ go silent mysteriously until someone remembers to start them
up again. I hope.

Which brings me to my next point: we _really_ need to get the lists
moved to a separate server that doesn't crash regularly, blocking our
ability to communicate with one another.

Something entirely offsite is not unreasonable; if the hosting center
catches fire or San Diego sinks into the sea ;) we should still be able
to bitch at each other about it on the lists.

The lists shouldn't require a _huge_ amount of bandwidth. It doesn't
need a low-latency connection to the database server (or any connection,
rather). It just needs a reliable host.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Interlanguage links on the CA WP

body:
On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 22:38, Jake Nelson wrote:
> Ah. I'd volunteer to help, but knowing next to nothing about the wiki
> software itself, that likely wouldn't help too much. Though if there is
> something, let me know.

Well, you can always learn! :)

Unfortunately conversion means you have to be more or less familiar with
weirdnesses in both UseModWiki -and- MediaWiki and try to match them up.
Ewwww...

> As an aside, I haven't yet received your mail - I checked the web archive to
> find it. While there, I noticed it labels message received times as UTC...
> but the time it lists is sender's local time. I wonder if that's a pipermail
> bug.

Yes, it seems to be:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=732366&group_id=103&atid=100103

I'll try applying the given patch... Mailman will kill me yet! :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Replication on its way

body:
Just a quick note: we don't have the disk space on larousse at present
to mirror the whole database.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Ah. I'd volunteer to help, but knowing next to nothing about the wiki
software itself, that likely wouldn't help too much. Though if there is
something, let me know.

As an aside, I haven't yet received your mail - I checked the web archive to
find it. While there, I noticed it labels message received times as UTC...
but the time it lists is sender's local time. I wonder if that's a pipermail
bug.

-- Jake, bugmagnet.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fun with domain names

body:
I've been poking around with the domains mav registered with verio.net &
godaddy.com, and I _think_ I've figured out how to get them to work.
Mostly.

Changes I've just made, which could take a couple days to go through the
system:

- *.wikimedia.org should point directly to larousse (had been just
wikimedia.org and www.wikimedia.org)
- mail to wikimedia.org or www.wikimedia.org should go to
mail.wikipedia.org
- *.wiktionary.org should point directly to pliny ("")
- *.wikibook.org, *.wikibook.com should point directly to pliny
- wikibooks.org, www.wikibooks.org should point directly to pliny

I can't figure out yet how to set up a wildcard entry on godaddy.com,
and our servers aren't reliable enough that I'd want to use them as
nameservers instead. :P

I don't know who has wikiquote.org/com, it's not in the list that mav
sent me last month.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing list names

body:
On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 00:50, tarquin wrote:
> These have recently been changed to long names such as "A list for
> discussing ......"
>
> However, due to a Mozilla bug, this makes attachments impossible to see
> because the name doesn't wrap.

That, and it takes up way too much space on my screen. Some of them
don't fit in one line of text.

> These very long names aren't terribly wieldy either -- please consider
> shortening them.

Agreed. The config page for this setting says:

               WikiEN-l Mailing list Configuration Help
                           description Option
  description (general): A terse phrase identifying this list.

  This description is used when the mailing list is listed with other
  mailing lists, or in headers, and so forth. It should be as succinct
  as you can get it, while still identifying what the list is.

I'm changing now:

<wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
from: A mailing list for discussing about the technical organization of
the Wikipedias
to: Wikimedia developers

<wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
from: Discussion list for English-language Wikipedia
to: English Wikipedia

<intlwiki-l at wikipedia.org>
from: The international mailing list of all Wikipedias
to: Wikipedia multilingual issues

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: phil hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Bot for generating articles on cities in Israel

body:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 18:57:23 -0700 (PDT), Steve Vertigum <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:
>> Steve Vertigum wrote:
>> >And what is wrong with having an anti-apartheid
>> bias?
>> >
>> Though I'm generally no fan of Israel's, I'd argue
>> that many
>> "anti-Israel biases" are not "anti-apartheid
>> biases", but rather
>> "anti-Jewish biases."
>
>I see your point. But is'nt it anti-Israel to even
>mention "apartheid" in the context of Israel? So its
>ok to be anti-apartheid, but its anti-semitic to say
>Israel is an apartheid state?

Whether or not it is, is irrelevant. It is POV to say "Israel is an
apartheid state". It is NPOV (and demonstrably true) to say "Some
consider Israel to be an apartheid state".

We're writing an NPOV encyclopedia, remember.

--
A: top posting

Q: what's the most annoying thing about Usenet?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Database locked?

body:
On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 01:41, Richard Grevers wrote:
> Does anyone have any idea how long meta.wikipedia.org will be displaying
> "Database locked for a few minutes" when you try to edit?
> After 2 and a half hours it's starting to feel like "Mars is a few miles
>  from Earth".

Bug in the backup script.

Missing one space.

GRRRRRGGGGGG

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 300000

body:
> >Everybody stop writing articles now!!!!!!!!!!! ;)
>
> That's not going to happen unless we implement
> Nupedia-style editorial controls or pull the plug on
> the server. ;)

That might if wikipedia goes on being stuck every
couple of hours ;-)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l Wikipedia stuck

body:
Thinking about it...when Wikipedia was down yesterday,
only the english wikipedia displayed a red message
saying  it was not editable, but allowed read only.
On the french wikipedia, it was just and that was all.
No warning message saying "well, guys, sorry, we are
trying to fix the stuff" and not even read-only
wikipedia.

I don't know if this is due to the existence of the
two servers and if it would have been possible that
the fr wikipedia be read only as well.

If it is possible, could it be that we switch to read
only mode and alert message as well, instead of just
letting people wondering why the whole site is not
working at all ?

Sorry if I just don't understand the organisation of
that at all. I just think it is real bad that people
just don't know what is going on.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Kkawohl and my RFA

body:
Two items, the first leading to the second.
Shortly after cleaning up the botched-HTML mess of links under
[[Transcendentalist Hypothesis of the Fourth Dimension]] on VFD, I saw that
someone at 68.5.127.81 had removed all comments about said page there. I
reverted, and checked his user contributions: He'd previously posted Kurt
Kawohl's everything2 spiel to [[Talk:Transcendentalism]] and made some
comments on the talk page of THOTFD consistent with Kawhol's writing. Most
recently, he'd removed the VFD notice from THOTFD (and later blanked it
entirely). I reverted, he reblanked a few times.  I tracerouted the ip, and
it came out to a cox.net address in Irvine, CA. Kurt Kawohl lives in
southern CA and has a cox.net email address. With the deletion of comments
from VFD and attempting to remove VFD notice from that page, and his not
having contributed -anything- to Wikipedia other than posting his rambling
essays, I'm thinking ban. At the least, he needs to be informed that his
behavior is unacceptable, and he's rapidly heading towards a ban.

This was either the second or the third time I've had a back-and-forth
reversion issue with an anon (I call them that, despite the irony- one's IP
gives away much more than a login- but I digress) vandal... I find it rather
irritating to not be able to simply stop them, and this has led me to do
something I've been meaning to do for a little while (holding off because I
felt that I was too new): requested adminship on [[WP:RFA]].

Anyhow. Just thought'd I'd mention all that.

-- Jake


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing list names

body:
These have recently been changed to long names such as "A list for
discussing ......"

However, due to a Mozilla bug, this makes attachments impossible to see
because the name doesn't wrap.

These very long names aren't terribly wieldy either -- please consider
shortening them.


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Wikitech-l] Small feature suggestion

body:
Hello.

Here's a feature suggestion: when previewing a modified page, display
links to redirections in a different color.
Currently we only see if the link exists or not. But i think we should
try to link straight to 'the right page', and not to a redirection page,
so seeing if we link to a redirection would help.
I don't say redirect are evil, just that if we can avoid using'em, it's
better...

Just my 2 cents of ? :)

Nicolas


subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Allan-
> > So, is this happening? What username is Adam
> editing under?
>
> Contrary to his promise to use the name "Adam
> [name omitted for privacy reasons]", Adam is again
> editing under the name Pizza Puzzle, after he has
> lied to Jimbo about not
> having used that name in the past. (Jimbo has been
> in denial about this
> since it was first brought up.) He has not openly
> acknowledged on his user
> page yet that he is Adam, although he left a comment
> on Tim Starling's
> saying that he "did lots of good work with all my
> names".
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Some people said he needs to call himself Adam, others
said he just has to be consistant. I personally think
he has to be consistant, and many people have called
him Adam without his objection, so I'd say that that
qualifies as identifying himself.
LDan

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