from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir and minor edits

body:
It's interesting reading cunctuator's hot tips for lir again. Note how it states, "Please use the This is a minor edit checkbox to mark minor edits. " Apparantly, when I first started on the wiki I didn't click the minor edits box often enough, then when I changed and started using minor edits more, I was again condemened for using minor edits too much!

---------------------------------
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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Acronyms

body:
|From: "Pedro M.V." <macv at interlap.com.ar>
|Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 05:04:35 +0100
||
|We need in wikipedia free     http://www.acronymfinder.com/
|
|Regards.
|

Seems to be marketing for Amazon books.  I searched on ILO, it gave me
a bunch of expansions, such as "International Labor Organizaton" and
"In Lieu Of", each with a button that led to the results of an Amazon
search using the expanded term as keywords.  Clever, but too
commercial for us, don't you think?

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


list: wikien-l

from_name: rednblack at alum.mit.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
StreetLawyer, is that you?

Saurabh

------
"In the struggle of Good against Evil, it's always the people who get killed."
	-- Eduardo Galeano, "Upside Down"

In message <3E41E19E.4060705 at njit.edu>, Jesse Alter said:
>Hey, I'm new to the list, and I hope to keep up a bit. The main reason I
>subscribed was to talk about User:VeraCruz/Lir. I've been speaking to
>them on and off of Wikipedia, and they seem like a nice person. We've
>been speaking about various topics, and when advising me about
>Wikipedia, he's taught me a lot about empiricism and NPOV. I've read
>some articles he has contributed a lot to...
>
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kuwait
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_auxiliary_cruiser
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Mayhew_Wainwright_IV
>
>...and I've been fairly impressed. I asked him if he could help me with
>a stub article I started, about Moulay Ismail, the Bloodthirsty. I had
>been unable to find much information on him, but over an IM conversation...
>
>Him: are u talking about the prince of saudi arabia?
>Him: or the sultan?
>Me: This is a 17th century dude.
>Him: associated with Louis XIV ?
>Him: asked to marry the Princess of Conti?
>Him: did he have 800 children/
>Him: he ordered that the heads of 10,000 slain enemies adorn the walls
>of the two great imperial capitals, Fes and Marrakech.
>Him: heh us hould include this conversation where i find info for u as
>an example of how useful i am
>Him: Moulay Ismail enlisted over 25,000 Christian prisoners and 30,000
>common criminals to build his pretentious city, and brought over 16,000
>slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in his military machine. By the
>time of his death in 1727, the Black Guard, as it was known, had grown
>tenfold and was one of the largest death guards in Morocco's history.
>Me: 800 children..
>Me: Yeah.
>Me: Geez man.
>Him: His grandson, Mohammed III, moved the capital back to Marrakech
>Him: most of Ismail's great monuments are still standing
>Him: Most of the fanciest tile work and wealth were stripped from Meknes
>and used to build up other imperial cities
>
>and he also gave me a LOT of helpful links. *groan* I need to synthesize
>all of that information later...
>
>I understand there were disagreements with other users. This is of
>course bound to happen, and Wikipedia boasts its ability to resolve
>those sorts of conflicts through its Talk page. This user is obviously
>someone who has the potential to be a great contributor to Wikipedia. I
>see no reason for him to be banned.
>
>Thanks,
>
>cprompt
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 23:16, Jesse Alter wrote:
> Hey, I'm new to the list, and I hope to keep up a bit. The main reason I
> subscribed was to talk about User:VeraCruz/Lir. I've been speaking to
> them on and off of Wikipedia, and they seem like a nice person. We've
> been speaking about various topics, and when advising me about
> Wikipedia, he's taught me a lot about empiricism and NPOV. I've read
> some articles he has contributed a lot to...
>
The short answer is that Adam consistently refused to work with others
or make an evident attempt to understand Wikipedia standards (e.g.
naming conventions, minor edits). He also had a nettlesome propensity of
altering people's comments on his talk page to completely change the
meaning of the comments. And doing other things to deliberately tease
other contributors. Then there's the whole multiple identity/sex-change
behavior.

See [[User:The Cunctator/Advice for Lir]] for advice Adam never
followed.

A longer answer goes into the personalities of other active
contributors, why anyone is banned at all, etc. etc. At some point he
decided he was being persecuted and then started behaving more
childishly, at which other people got into the act (see the edit history
of User:Lir to see some disgraceful behavior by others). And so forth.

Search for Lir on the mailing list archives.

--tc


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimaps

body:
Pedro M.V. wrote:

> I suggest create www.wikimaps.com .

Sure, you can do this, go ahead.  Why don't you?  When you have
created useful maps, Wikipedia can use them.  It doesn't have to be
the same project.  What are you waiting for?

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


subject: [Wikitech-l] "send this to a friend"

body:
tarquin wrote:
> Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a  "send this article
> to a friend" link on every page?

Sounds like a perfect spamming machine!  Go in anonymously, create a
new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
"friend".  And the next friend, and the next, ...

If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
ink cartridges]], and mail that.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Classic Nordic Literature online since 1992 - http://runeberg.org/


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Should I post the Drug Testing FAQ?

body:
mindfuq at comcast.net writes:
> > > Is wikipedia the right place for me to post the faq, or is there
> > > another *pedia that would be better suited?
> http://www.csun.edu/~hbcsc096/dt

It would need some adjustements towards NPOV but I would very much like
to see the informations given there incorporated in Wikipedia.

I think we had already a similar case in the surveillance article which
was also taken from some external FAQ.

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] WWW 2003 conference in Hungary, May 20-24

body:
On May 20-24, the 12th international World Wide Web Conference is held
in Budapest, Hungary.  The deadline for posters is tomorrow, Feb 7,
and for "developers day" on Feb 14.  Among the developers day topics
(http://www.www2003.org/dd/) there is one titled "[D7] Authoring
Techniques and Tools for Accessibility and Device Independence".
This sounds very interesting, like it could turn into a wiki workshop.
I don't know if I can go there, but perhaps someone else can.

Read all about it at the conference website, http://www.www2003.org/
or at W3C's http://www.w3.org/Conferences/Overview-WWW.html

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Coordenates

body:
It?s important the user include the coordinates ( degrees North, South, East, West ) of the Cities in wikipedia articles. So, in the future will be more easy see maps of the city using these coordinates. (links to image search machines).

Regards.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Acronyms

body:
We need in wikipedia free     http://www.acronymfinder.com/

Regards.
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

in_reply_to: <3E427018.1060801@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 02:24:24PM +0000

body:
tarquin wrote:
> I'm still trying to work out if your comment of "when a lady acts in
> an ungentlemanly way a gentleman always apologizes!" is meant to be
> tongue-in-cheek....

I missed that one.  If we take away the "old fashioned" sex roles
implied, I think that the general sentiment is very useful to
wikipedia.  We should all stand ready to apologize, as stepping on
toes is so easy to do in the heat of discussion and debate,
particularly on emotional pages.  And it's VERY important that we all
be ready to apologize for our own wrongdoing, even if the other person
won't.

(And sometimes, if we take a deep breath, we will realize that the
other person doesn't really owe us an apology after all.)

I'm sure in real life we've all seen the situation of two people in an
argument who both desperately want to make up and move on, but insist
for whatever reason that the other person has to "go first".  If he'll
apologize, then I will.  It's unfortunate, but it's an easy trap to
fall into.

I hope Adam is listening here.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

in_reply_to: <005801c2cdc9$acc1d560$a9a9e6d9@maximilian>; from jansson@gmx.net on Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 11:20:51AM +0100

body:
I have no opposition, in principle, to just about any sort of license,
so long as it preserves what I think are the essential features of our
license, namely: that no one can make our work proprietary (closed).
I would not be happy with a BSD-style license, for example.

But I do think that the practical obstacles to dual-licensing are
pretty high.

Kurt, can you sum up for us what advantage the license you linked
would have over the GNU FDL?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] "send this to a friend"

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> tarquin wrote:
> > Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a  "send this article
> > to a friend" link on every page?
>
> Sounds like a perfect spamming machine!  Go in anonymously, create a
> new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
> "friend".  And the next friend, and the next, ...
>
> If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
> ink cartridges]], and mail that.

I think we can pretty easily protect against abuse by throttling the
system in a variety of ways.  That is, a single ip or user can only
use the system a maximum of 10 times in one day, 3 times per hour,
etc.  Such throttles won't be perfect, but it would allow us to have
this useful feature with a minimal possibility for abuse.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> The largest practical obstacle being that de GNU/FDL republication
> forbids under another or no license, whether it's stricter, less
> strict, or even effectively the same.

Right.  At very best, the dual-licensing scheme could only be applied
to *new* articles, or articles that contain *no* GNU/FDL content,
which is pretty hard to determine at this point.  I'm skeptical as to
whether this is possible.

I guess if we wanted to do something like this, we'd have to find a
license that solves some really important problem.  I don't know what
the Creative Commons license here is supposed to have as an advantage.

--Jimbo


from_name: youssefsan-wiki at altern.org

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Ambassades et petit rapporteur

body:
Hello.

Thanks Anthere. I do not deserve such a praise.
Well, I will try to dedicate some time,
to improve communication. Please feel free to let
messages on my user pages or by email. You can do it
in English, French, Spanish and Dutch.

Regards,
Youssef


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
Lir didn't have to be banned. S/he could have kept within the fold instead of becoming a lost sheep.

Look at me. I'm a wild and crazy guy (with apologies to Steve Martin), but I've managed to avoid being banned, even though I've had sharp disagreements with nearly everyone here. Why just the other day, Mav said, "With friends like you who needs enemies?"

The atheists think I'm a "nut" because I believe in God, or worse, because I'm a member of the Unification Church. The Democrats think I'm too pro-Bush; gay rights advocates despise my anti-homosexuality views. And I just got raked over the coals for the umpteenth time over [[global warming]].

But I've survived, despite periodic calls for demotion or banning, because I GO ALONG TO GET ALONG. Anyone can order me around: I am a "servant of servants", like Joseph in Egypt (see Genesis). This is so important that I'm going to draw a box around it!

*****************************************
* Lir/Vera needs to pick their battles, *
* which means knowing when it's time to *
* drop a point and move on to the next  *
* task.          -- Uncle Ed            *
*****************************************

I miss Lir. Their contributions, when on target, were often nothing short of brilliant. But an obnoxious genius is not welcome anywhere. Lir has to learn how to avoid antagonizing people.

Okay, I'm not the world's *greatest* example, but after all the dust has settled, even Mav has said, "You'll always be Uncle Ed in my heart."

Ed Poor
Wikipedia rights: sysop, developer
Other hats: mailing list admin


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Coordenates

body:
Pedro M.V. wrote:

> It?s important the user include the coordinates ( degrees North,
> South, East, West ) of the Cities in wikipedia articles. So, in the
> future will be more easy see maps of the city using these
> coordinates. (links to image search machines).

It is also important that users include the *correct* coordinates, and
one way is to provide a link to MapQuest.  This can be made analogous
to the ISBN links.  User inputs ISBN/coordinates, Wikipedia converts
this to a link to Amazon/MapQuest, user can click the link and see
that it leads to the correct item.

For example, San Diego has the center coordinates 32.72? N, 117.12? W
(decimal degrees) and the MapQuest URL is
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?latlongtype=decimal&latitude=32.72&longitude=-117.12&zoom=5

where zoom=5 is OK for large cities, and zoom=6 for smaller ones.
Note that west of Greenwich is negative.

Analogous to the ISBN: wiki syntax, this could be written as
map:32.72:-117.12

If MapQuest shuts down this service, or scrambles its URLs like
MapBlast did, the coordinates are still in the Wikipedia pages and the
script can be changed to make links to some other service that might
exist at that time.  Just like ISBN links, multiple links can also be
created, to different map vendors.  Therefore, the map wiki syntax
should not be vendor specific.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Front page of www

body:
It occurs to me that one big problem with finding a satisfactory
"international" front page on www is that it is protected, due to
being a big target for vandals.  When the page is not protected,
people will naturally edit and re-edit until a satisfactory compromise
is reached.

I wonder what would happen if we unprotected the home page for a few
days, with the *express plan* of trying to do something more
international there?

--Jimbo


from_name: wiki pedista

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative commons License

body:
The site of MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu )
uses the Creative Commons License. The summary of said
license
shows immediately to be totally incompatible with GNU
FDL,
because it forbids commercial use without
authorization.

AstroNomer

Wikikarma: Created the article ''Star formation'' (but
the server still doesn't accept it).

---------
P.S. Yes, I'm impatient, and don't want to wait for
phase IV for a really international www.wikipedia.org.
Though I
agree that the optimization of the database to improve
performance is more important it is also more difficult.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


from_name: Matthew MacKenzie

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia timeout....often!

body:
Does anyone know why Wikipedia is often unavailable (timeouts)?  I've
read that there are problems with the wiki software (table locking)
creating lag, but being unavailable even to read-only access seems a
little bit strange to me.

As of right now, I get timeouts connecting to www.wikipedia.org and
meta.wikipedia.org, while I experience no problems accessing other sites.

-matt (User:Ogmios)
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Maps

body:
I have implemented a map link demo at

    http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_testing

This consists of about 10 lines of source code :-)

Format is [[map:laltitude:longitude]] or
[[map:laltitude:longitude:zoom]]; if zoom is omitted, a default of 5 is
used.

It can be switched to wiki-internal maps, once we have some. For the
discussion about formats and stuff, see

    http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediatlas

Magnus

P.S.: I can't access sourceforge.net from the wikipedia server command
line anymore, so I can't check in these changes myself.


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Yugolsavia is now Serbia and Montenegro

body:
Zoe wrote:

> Yugoslavia officially has changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro.
> Should we move all of the Yugoslavia articles accordingly?
>
> Zoe
>
eeeeeeeeek!

well.... OTOMH, I'd say yes, if they mean the current country.
a country named Yugoslavia has existed, so we still need an article on
it, and man y things will still mention that. (smae way we have an
article on Prussia)


subject: [Wikitech-l] "send this to a friend"

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>Just a quick word -- any news on the idea to put a  "send this article
>>to a friend" link on every page?
>>
>>
>
>Sounds like a perfect spamming machine!  Go in anonymously, create a
>new page with your spam message, then have Wikipedia mail that to your
>"friend".  And the next friend, and the next, ...
>
>If only the link (page title) is mailed, create the page [[save big on
>ink cartridges]], and mail that.
>
>
hmmm. id not thought of that.
but AFAIK spammers need to mail out thousands if not *millions* of
emails for it to be effective. they're not going to bother doing it one
at a time.
secondly, we'd erase a page called [[save big on ink cartridges]] PDQ :-)

I think this would be a useful feature & could help us press-gang ...
*cough* I mean invite new contributors ;-)

>
>
>


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
Hi!

I thought someone else with more legal knowledge would start a
discussion about this. But nothing happened, so I'll do it:

Whould it be possible to dual licence the Wikipedia articles with one of
the new creative commons licences? Preferably this one:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
(Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0)

It's in the spirit of the GNU FDL (copyleft), but much simpler, and I
think the creative commons licences will become very important sooner or
later. We should make it as easy as possible for people to use our work,
as long as their's is also open content.

I guess we might be able to incorporate works under the
Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 licence, but not the other way round. But
IANAL. I guess the first paid employee of the Wikipedia foundation has
to be a copyright lawyer.
Is there a site somewhere that explains which free/open licences are
compatible with each other?

Of course it's impossible to ask everyone who has contributed to
wikipedia if it's okay to dual licence their work (I'm astonished that
it worked for Mozilla). But we might apply the creative commons licence
to all new articles, and to articles which have been heavily edited or
completely rewritten.

Kurt


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On ?a?, 2003-02-06 at 10:48, Matthew MacKenzie wrote:
> Does anyone know why Wikipedia is often unavailable (timeouts)?  I've
> read that there are problems with the wiki software (table locking)
> creating lag, but being unavailable even to read-only access seems a
> little bit strange to me.
>
> As of right now, I get timeouts connecting to www.wikipedia.org and
> meta.wikipedia.org, while I experience no problems accessing other sites.

Something overloaded something else and left Mysql miffed and Apache
dead. I've restarted them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

in_reply_to: <8fKNqS9xpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 08:36:00PM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
>When there's scheduled downtime, it is usually announced on the
>mailing list.  Let us know if you find someone willing to run a
>complete read-only mirror, that would help.

I volunteer.  What do we need to do?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www

body:
Jimbo wrote:

''I wonder what would happen if we unprotected the
home page for a few
days, with the *express plan* of trying to do
something more
international there?''

No, I don't think that would do the trick. That is the
Main Page of the english wikipedia, it doesn't have to
be multilingual (I think it is international enough).

The objection is that the www.wikipedia.org points to
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main+Page, the main page of
the ''english'' wikipedia, that doesn't necessarily
have to be the Main Page of the ''whole'' project.

(I wasn't going to bring this up for a while, but
Jimbo
asked)

AstroNomer

Wikikarma: Started article [[radiostronomia]] in
es.wikipedia

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
I'd like to setup a read-only mirror of wikipedia on ross.bomis.com,
and point a URL at it.  Possibly we can think of a good automatic
redirection scheme or something.  Well, I say "I'd like to...", but
actually that means "I'm willing to pay Jason to..."

Jason posted the other day about a zero budget, but that's not
*exactly* true.  :-)

We have some loose hardware sitting around that we might as well press
into service.

Ideally, we would have a way to _automatically_ redirect requests to
the read-only site when the full site is dead.

If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help, I'll do it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Clutch, Zoe, who else wants to ban?

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] <lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com> writes:

> Is there anybody who supports the ban against me besides Clutch and Zoe?

I do.  Strongly.  (For what thats worth, i.e. nothing)
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
> Of course it's impossible to ask everyone who has contributed to
> wikipedia if it's okay to dual licence their work (I'm astonished that
> it worked for Mozilla). But we might apply the creative commons licence
> to all new articles, and to articles which have been heavily edited or
> completely rewritten.

The problems:
1) We have to determine when an article has been sufficiently rewritten to
relicense it. This can be very tricky.
2) We will not be able to import FDL content as new articles unless we
specifically except it from the CC license.
3) We will not be able to import FDL content into dual licensed articles
unless we revoke the CC license.
4) Our open content concept is already confusing. I can only imagine how a
new visitor must feel when he reads about "dual licensing".

Regarding 2) & 3), this is the case because we cannot offer an additional
choice of license for works which are not our own.

Because this will create chaos with both new and existing articles, I am
against it. It is much more practical to convince someone who wants to use
Wikipedia material to use the FDL than for us to effectively switch to another
license. In those cases where an author absolutely wants to use CC-SA because it
doesn't have the letters "GNU" before its name, they can still contact the
individual authors of an article through its history, I'm sure most of them
will be cooperative, if they can be contacted.

I really do like the Creative Commons idea, but I would have much preferred
it if they had made use of existing licenses.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

in_reply_to: <3E42C89C.6030903@epost.de>; from magnus.manske@epost.de on Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 09:42:04PM +0100

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> >If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help, I'll do it.
> >

> I'm trying to picture that in my mind ;-)

It's fun to contemplate on days like today, when the server's
so unavailable.

> Question is wether to
> put mysql on the slower or the faster machine (assuming they're not
> identical).

Wikipedia is already on my best machine, so the second machine would
be slower.  And at least for now, I'm thinking of using a machine
that currently has a few little websites on it, and those would need
to stay there for now.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
Philipp W. wrote:
> Are there figures around of how much bandwidth and how
> much traffic wikipedia produces?

There are: http://www.wikipedia.org/stats/

But bandwidth, per se, is certainly not the issue.  Our pipeline is
not even close to full, running Bomis and Wikipedia and everything
else.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Reboot frequently (was: Accessing Wikipedia)

body:
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> As an alternative, simply reboot the server whenever response time slows to an unacceptable level. Oh, say 30+ seconds for a response is my maximum lag threshold, although others might say 5 or 10 is really a maximum.

That would be rather silly. Perhaps taking the db down for a few moments
would keep people away and thus reduce traffic, but a reboot isn't
necessary for that.

As it is, we restart Apache every half hour -- in a "graceful" restart
mode that doesn't interrupt downloads.

> How often should we reboot the server?

At most a couple times per year, for kernel upgrades or physical
relocation of the server.

If the server crashes completely (as it's done a couple times in the past
several months), then it also needs to be rebooted, but this is a very
rare occurance.

> Well, that depends on how long a reboot takes. If it takes 3 minutes to reboot, why not reboot once an hour? Or if it takes 10 minutes to reboot, why not reboot every 3 hours?
>
> Come on, people, this is not rocket science!! At least reboot once a day.

I take it you've been doing a lot of work with Microsoft products? :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com: [WikiEN-l] Reboot frequently (was: Accessing Wikipedia)]

body:
I would support any and all temporary "ad hoc" measures that make
sense to the other developers to kick start the server automatically
from time to time.

For example, envision a cron job that semi-intelligently (or
semi-stupidly!) hunts for those runaway killer processes and just kill
-9's them.  Whatever someone is doing to kill the machine, they should
stop.

Of course, we should *also* hunt down and resolve the problems that
lead to this, but really, it's just as important to keep this puppy
humming along.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www

body:
--- wiki pedista <wikipedista at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Jimbo wrote:
>
> ''I wonder what would happen if we unprotected the
> home page for a few
> days, with the *express plan* of trying to do
> something more
> international there?''
>
> No, I don't think that would do the trick. That is
> the
> Main Page of the english wikipedia, it doesn't have
> to
> be multilingual (I think it is international
> enough).
> (I wasn't going to bring this up for a while, but
> Jimbo
> asked)
>
> AstroNomer

I wholeheartedly agree with you Astronomer !!!!

The actual main page of the whole project should be
english only ! These utterly irritating internationals
should really feel happy enough we are putting
international links everywhere to please them ! The
main page could be *deeply damaged* (utterly destroyed
?) if anybody aside very trusted english sysops had
the right to edit it !

Really, what were you thinking here WikiLover !

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] email prefs

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>
>>On the fr: or en:, I type my email into the preferences box, press the
>>"save" button, and the page reloads with the text "Your preferences have
>>been saved." on top
>>
>>but the email field is now blank.
>>
>>is this behaviour or bug, and if the former, could there be a note about
>>it -- at the moment, one gets the impression that the entered data has
>>been lost in the ether.
>>
>>
>
>Question: are you using Mozilla or Netscape 6 or kin, and told the browser
>to save your login & password for logging in to wikipedia?
>
>
>I think this triggers a bug whereby it mistakenly believes that the
>preferences form is the same as the login form, and fills in the same
>value you used for the e-mail address -- probably blank.
>
>In any case, for me the problem goes away if I clear the saved forms and
>don't let it save my login.
>
Yup - Mozilla, latest "clean" release.
I'll try it. thanks :-)

>
>

>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Lir didn't have to be banned. S/he could have kept within the fold instead of becoming a lost sheep.
>
His/her recent long note to Jimbo suggests she/he may be ready for a
trial return. but posting while banned & playing around with multiple
IDs isn't encouraging

>
>
>The atheists think I'm a "nut" because I believe in God, or worse, because I'm a member of the Unification Church. The Democrats think I'm too pro-Bush; gay rights advocates despise my anti-homosexuality views. And I just got raked over the coals for the umpteenth time over [[global warming]].
>
>
I'm still trying to work out if your comment of "when a lady acts in an
ungentlemanly way a gentleman always apologizes!" is meant to be
tongue-in-cheek....

>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
I was paraphrasing Robert Heinlein, who in [[Time Enough for Love]] wrote something like, "In a family argument, if it turns out that you're right, apologize at once!" This was advice from a man with a 2,000-year-old woodie -- er, I mean a 2,000 year old man named Woodie or Lazarus or maybe Theodore.

Another Heinlein character said, "I'm at my most serious when I'm joking."

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: tarquin [mailto:tarquin at planetunreal.com]

I'm still trying to work out if your comment of "when a lady acts in an
ungentlemanly way a gentleman always apologizes!" is meant to be
tongue-in-cheek....


body:
As an alternative, simply reboot the server whenever response time slows to an unacceptable level. Oh, say 30+ seconds for a response is my maximum lag threshold, although others might say 5 or 10 is really a maximum.

How often should we reboot the server?

Well, that depends on how long a reboot takes. If it takes 3 minutes to reboot, why not reboot once an hour? Or if it takes 10 minutes to reboot, why not reboot every 3 hours?

Come on, people, this is not rocket science!! At least reboot once a day.

-- An increasing frustrated and impatient "Uncle Ed" Poor


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I have no opposition, in principle, to just about any sort of license,
> so long as it preserves what I think are the essential features of our
> license, namely: that no one can make our work proprietary (closed).
> I would not be happy with a BSD-style license, for example.
>
> But I do think that the practical obstacles to dual-licensing are
> pretty high.

The largest practical obstacle being that de GNU/FDL republication forbids
under another or no license, whether it's stricter, less strict, or even
effectively the same.

Andre Engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
> I hope Adam is listening here.

Adam/Lir/Vera/Bridget has apologized repeatedly, though. I think it would be
fair to do the following:

1) Place a time limit on the current ban, e.g. March 2003; alternatively
2) Set out clear conditions which she can meet to be unbanned immediately.

Otherwise you open the door for all kinds of abuse. It should certainly not
be the authority of individuals who were offended by Lir's behavior to keep
up the ban. And I do not think we should have indefinite bans -- we can extent
the ban period for repeat violations, though.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
tarquin wrote:

>
>
> Zoe wrote:
>
>> Yugoslavia officially has changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro.
>> Should we move all of the Yugoslavia articles accordingly?
>>
>> Zoe
>>
> eeeeeeeeek!
>
> well.... OTOMH, I'd say yes, if they mean the current country.
> a country named Yugoslavia has existed, so we still need an article on
> it, and man y things will still mention that. (smae way we have an
> article on Prussia)

At the same time IIRC they agreed to have a referendum in three years on
splitting the two.  This could be a short lived entity.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help, I'll do it.
> >
> I'm trying to picture that in my mind ;-)
>
> Seriously: Something that *might* help not only with that problem, but
> would likely reduce server load (and thus, crashes in the first place)
> would be to run apache and mysql on different servers. IIRC, this is
> suggested by both apache and mysql online manuals.

If this is practicable, I fully support it.

> Question is wether to
> put mysql on the slower or the faster machine (assuming they're not
> identical).

Put mysql on the fast one -- it's the database that's our big bad.

> Some (third) machine could just mirror the apache server machine and
> jump in if the need arises (=apache machine crashes); it could even have
> read-write access. Also, no need for up-to-the-minute backups etc.
> We'd only get a problem if the mysql machine dies :-(

The apache machine is less likely to be a problem. My preference would be
something like:

* apache-only: Running apache, php script, image storage, TeX and other
               incidentals
* mysql-only: MySQL with the database. That's about it. Maybe in the
              future someday it could be postgresql-only. ;)
* backup: another machine running mysql as a slave to the main db
          server, and maybe other stuff. Perhaps even apache for a read-
          only web-accessible mirror. Takes a few gigs of space, but most
          of the time it should be relatively low-traffic.

This backup machine would slurp in updates to the database, but would
still be runnable if no more updates come. New uploads could be copied
over occasionally. I'm uncertain what kind of granularity we can get with
MySQL's replication; can we leave out the user table (in whole or in part)
for instance? Not a big deal if it's just to another of Jimbo's machines,
but I'd be leery of shipping e-mail addresses and password hashes over the
internet to a third-party mirror site.

If we have a backup db and the main one failed (by crashing, by hard drive
failure, by act of god, or simply by getting overfull doing something and
screaming "TOO MANY CONNECTIONS!"), the main apache box could switch over
to use it and clamp into read-only mode. (This is much easier than
failover for the web server, which needs funky IP dealings or possibly a
very ugly DNS hack which is probably a bad idea.)

Notes; I'm not sure how much bandwidth would be required just for database
traffic, or for updates. I'll check into that tonight. If it's within an
internal network, it shouldn't be a problem.

I don't know if Jimbo can spare two machines, though. (Anyone care to make
a donation? Not a tax write-off as the foundation isn't set up yet,
but if you're addicted to Wikipedia and your time is valuable to you...)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] User banned, why?

body:
IF he is unbanned, and IF he continues his usual obnoxiousness, I will leave.  It's that simple.
Zoe
 Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:> I hope Adam is listening here.

Adam/Lir/Vera/Bridget has apologized repeatedly, though. I think it would be
fair to do the following:

1) Place a time limit on the current ban, e.g. March 2003; alternatively
2) Set out clear conditions which she can meet to be unbanned immediately.

Otherwise you open the door for all kinds of abuse. It should certainly not
be the authority of individuals who were offended by Lir's behavior to keep
up the ban. And I do not think we should have indefinite bans -- we can extent
the ban period for repeat violations, though.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creative commons License

body:
On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 13:32, wiki pedista wrote:
> The site of MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu )
> uses the Creative Commons License. The summary of said
> license
> shows immediately to be totally incompatible with GNU
> FDL,
> because it forbids commercial use without
> authorization.
>
There's not only one Creative Commons license (part of the problem with
the branding). There are Creative Commons licenses that put no
restrictions on commercial use.


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

body:
I've been trying to access Wikipedia for hours now -- to no avail.
Immediately before that, simply saving an edit took more than a minute. My
knowledge in this field is extremely limited, but I've come to really hate
those periodical breakdowns. What is more, I guess newbies will be appalled
if they happen to be editing an article during such a time.

My three questions:

(1) Are these shutdowns a worldwide phenomenon, or is it just me (in good
old Europe) having difficulty?

(2) Are they planned (some sysop/developer/whoever making some important
changes etc.) or do they happen accidentally?

(3) If they are planned, could the community of users be given notice when
and approximately for how long Wikipedia will be down?

Kurt Forstner aka KF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

body:
> (1) Are these shutdowns a worldwide phenomenon, or is it just me (in good
> old Europe) having difficulty?

Worldwide. Sucks big time.

> (2) Are they planned (some sysop/developer/whoever making some important
> changes etc.) or do they happen accidentally?

Both. We've had some major database updates recently, but we also have
occasional problems. A total crash without apparent reason, and this time
MySQL max_connections problems, even though we're already at 250 and use
pconnect (persistent connections).

> (3) If they are planned, could the community of users be given notice when
> and approximately for how long Wikipedia will be down?

When there's scheduled downtime, it is usually announced on the mailing
list.  Let us know if you find someone willing to run a complete read-only
mirror, that would help.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Front page of www

body:
> It occurs to me that one big problem with finding a satisfactory
> "international" front page on www is that it is protected, due to
> being a big target for vandals.  When the page is not protected,
> people will naturally edit and re-edit until a satisfactory compromise
> is reached.

> I wonder what would happen if we unprotected the home page for a few
> days, with the *express plan* of trying to do something more
> international there?

Right now, we have international links:
- at the top of the frontpage
- at the bottom of the frontpage
- in the right part of the frontpage table, under "In other languages"
- behind the link "multilingual", the third word of the intro text.

I've probably missed something because there's so darn many of them.
Still, through some amazing editing, we have managed to fit some actual
information about the English Wikipedia on the page. I fail to see why we
should remove even more of that information. No other Wikipedia gives as
much prominence to the other languages.

We will move www->en eventually. But please, let's see some priorities.
All Wikipedias were down in the last few hours because of some bizarre
MySQL problems. I'm sure we have more skilled database engineers than are
currently on the wikitech-l mailing list. So if the other language
Wikipedias want to actually help, in real, mutual cooperation, then get us
some hackers. That will also speed up the www->en transition process.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

body:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> When there's scheduled downtime, it is usually announced on the
>> mailing list.  Let us know if you find someone willing to run a
>> complete read-only mirror, that would help.

> I volunteer.  What do we need to do?

Heh :-) If it's in your network, you probably just need to copy the source
files and the tables from /var/lib/mysql (or wherever your MySQL databases
reside) in a nightly cronjob to some other machine that's set up the same
way as our current one. Since I don't have access to the Wikipedia server,
you need to ask Brion for details regarding the cvs update scripts and so
on, but it should all be fairly straightforward. The only difference would
be that the database is locked on the read-only serevr.

Everyone else can run a mirror by simply importing the database dumps on a
regular basis, though.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help, I'll do it.
>
>
I'm trying to picture that in my mind ;-)

Seriously: Something that *might* help not only with that problem, but
would likely reduce server load (and thus, crashes in the first place)
would be to run apache and mysql on different servers. IIRC, this is
suggested by both apache and mysql online manuals. Question is wether to
put mysql on the slower or the faster machine (assuming they're not
identical).

Some (third) machine could just mirror the apache server machine and
jump in if the need arises (=apache machine crashes); it could even have
read-write access. Also, no need for up-to-the-minute backups etc.
We'd only get a problem if the mysql machine dies :-(

Magnus


from_name: Philipp W.

subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
Are there figures around of how much bandwidth and how
much traffic wikipedia produces?

Phil

Jimmy Wales sagte:
> I'd like to setup a read-only mirror of wikipedia on ross.bomis.com, and
> point a URL at it.  Possibly we can think of a good automatic
> redirection scheme or something.  Well, I say "I'd like to...", but
> actually that means "I'm willing to pay Jason to..."
>
> Jason posted the other day about a zero budget, but that's not
> *exactly* true.  :-)
>
> We have some loose hardware sitting around that we might as well press
> into service.
>
> Ideally, we would have a way to _automatically_ redirect requests to the
> read-only site when the full site is dead.
>
> If throwing hardware at the problem is likely to help, I'll do it.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
On ?a?, 2003-02-06 at 20:38, Philipp W. wrote:
> > over occasionally. I'm uncertain what kind of granularity we can get
> > with MySQL's replication; can we leave out the user table (in whole or
> > in part) for instance? Not a big deal if it's just to another of Jimbo's
> > machines, but I'd be leery of shipping e-mail addresses and password
> > hashes over the internet to a third-party mirror site.
>
> mysql supports ssl-encryption, so.... this should't be a problem.

That's only part of the problem; the other part is trusting the mirror
site to maintain privacy and security at least as well as we do on the
main server. I.e. there is an expectation that we will not give out (or
sell!) a user's e-mail address without their consent and knowledge. And
certainly it seems unsafe to toss password hashes around.

If we fully trust the mirrors with thousands of peoples' addys and
passwords, then no problem. If we let anyone mirror willy-nilly, then
I'm rather more concerned.

Hmm... http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Replication_Options.html

There's an option "replicate-ignore-table" for the *slave*, but as far
as I can tell the smallest granularity we can get for the replicatable
data from the *master* end is "binlog-ignore-db". Unless we move
sensitive user data into its own database, I don't think we can exclude
it.

> > Notes; I'm not sure how much bandwidth would be required just for
> > database traffic, or for updates. I'll check into that tonight. If it's
> > within an internal network, it shouldn't be a problem.
>
> it's about twice the real data, but mysql and ssh supports compression!

The binary update log from the latest server run (about 22:00 to 05:00)
is currently at 46,222,269 bytes. That's an average of about 6 megs per
hour, or 150 megs per day. Gzip compression should take that down a fair
bit. (This is for all languages combined.)

Hmm, note to self: don't gzip the *current* log file to see how big it
is; now updates to it are going into magical deleted file land.
Fortunately we don't need them yet. :)  (Actually, I can free up a huge
load of disk space if I just dump the older binlogs; if we set up
replication it'll be from a clean dump.) In any case, it compresses to
about 7 megs, so we might estimate 24 megs per day as a minimum.

As far as traffic between posited separate db and web servers at
Wikipedia Central:
| Bytes_received           | 995768056  |
| Bytes_sent               | 1471733779 |
| Uptime                   | 27260      |

That's about 90kb per second average. Should be fine over local network.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
> Seriously: Something that *might* help not only with that problem, but
> would likely reduce server load (and thus, crashes in the first place)
> would be to run apache and mysql on different servers. IIRC, this is
> suggested by both apache and mysql online manuals. Question is wether
> to
>  put mysql on the slower or the faster machine (assuming they're not
> identical).

Apache should never crash... if so, something is wrong! i'd try to
install freeBSD with Apache on the slower computer, and redhat-linux
with mysql4 on the faster one.
Even an old PII 400 is fast enough to serve several tousand users at the
same time. it should only have a lot of memory!

And.. of course.... is your internet connection bandwith limited? if
so... this produces a lot of load if the server-load is near the maximum
possible bw, so... keep that in mind,,,

Phil


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

body:
How much bandwith use winkipedia ? I haaaave the server but probably not the
bandwith.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Accessing Wikipedia

> > Erik Moeller wrote:
> >> When there's scheduled downtime, it is usually announced on the
> >> mailing list.  Let us know if you find someone willing to run a
> >> complete read-only mirror, that would help.
>
> > I volunteer.  What do we need to do?
>
> Heh :-) If it's in your network, you probably just need to copy the source
> files and the tables from /var/lib/mysql (or wherever your MySQL databases
> reside) in a nightly cronjob to some other machine that's set up the same
> way as our current one. Since I don't have access to the Wikipedia server,
> you need to ask Brion for details regarding the cvs update scripts and so
> on, but it should all be fairly straightforward. The only difference would
> be that the database is locked on the read-only serevr.
>
> Everyone else can run a mirror by simply importing the database dumps on a
> regular basis, though.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Random page queue filling is darn slow

body:
Earlier today I noticed that it was taking quite a long time to refill
the random page queue; this currently works by:

INSERT
  INTO random(ra_current,ra_title)
  SELECT 0,cur_title
    FROM cur
    WHERE cur_namespace=0 AND cur_is_redirect=0
    ORDER BY RAND()
    LIMIT 1000

Is it actually trying to reorder all 100,000+ entries randomly and then
taking the first 1000, or does it just _seem_ that slow? And is there
actually a faster way of doing this?

Off the top of my head; what if the random queue listed *every* page;
each page would be queued when it was created (and removed if deleted or
changed to non-"article" state), and associated with a random index
number. When asked to view a random page, we sort on the random index
column (which would be indexed!) and take the lowest number; then assign
that same article a new random index.

This wouldn't require the occasional delay to refill the queue, and
since the random index would be indexed, retrieval should be quick
enough even with a large number of articles.

Thoughts?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Getting rid of filesort?

body:
On lun, 2003-02-03 at 16:59, Jan Hidders wrote:
> Anyway, there is actually a "trick" that you can use here to get always the
> chronological order and that is to define an in index on (old_namespace,
> old_title, old_timestamp) and forcing MySQL to use that index

Okay, finally got around to trying this (on test wiki). The EXPLAIN
results are looking very promising -- it gets rid of the "using
filesort" and is presumably sorting with the index... *but only if
sorting forwards*.

If it were just the order the results come in, no big deal, but we need
to grab the last X rows and I don't know of another way to do that than
a reverse sort and LIMIT. No one wants to transfer all 15,000 of mav's
edits from the db just to display the last 50! (Well, I suppose you
could do two queries, one just to count, then one forward-sorted with
LIMIT N-X,X. But, that's ugly and increases load on the db.)

MySQL 3.x doesn't support using an index to sort backwards. However, if
I'm reading the docs correctly*, MySQL 4.x _does_. This may be a strong
argument in favor of upgrading.

* http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/ORDER_BY_optimisation.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Getting rid of filesort?

body:
I can't access the CVS server right now, so I've attached the
experimental index tweaks and sample queries for contribs and history.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Contribs:

EXPLAIN SELECT old_namespace,old_title,old_timestamp,old_comment FROM old
USE INDEX (usertext_timestamp)
WHERE old_timestamp > '20030201000000' AND old_user_text='XXX'
ORDER BY old_timestamp DESC LIMIT 50;
| table | type | possible_keys               | key           | key_len | ref   | rows | Extra
| old   | ref  | old_timestamp,old_user_text | old_user_text |     255 | const |    1 | where used; Using filesort |
| old   | range | old_timestamp,usertext_timestamp | usertext_timestamp |     269 | NULL |    1 | where used; Using filesort |

EXPLAIN SELECT old_namespace,old_title,old_timestamp,old_comment FROM old
USE INDEX (user_timestamp)
WHERE old_timestamp > '20030201000000' AND old_user=1
ORDER BY old_timestamp DESC LIMIT 50;
+-------+------+------------------------+----------+---------+-------+------+----------------------------+
| table | type | possible_keys          | key      | key_len | ref   | rows | Extra                      |
+-------+------+------------------------+----------+---------+-------+------+----------------------------+
| old   | ref  | old_timestamp,old_user | old_user |       4 | const |    1 | where used; Using filesort |
+-------+------+------------------------+----------+---------+-------+------+----------------------------+
| old   | range | old_timestamp,user_timestamp | user_timestamp |      18 | NULL |    1 | where used; Using filesort |

History:

EXPLAIN SELECT old_id,old_user,
old_comment,old_user_text,old_timestamp,old_minor_edit FROM old
USE INDEX (name_title_timestamp)
WHERE old_namespace=0 AND
old_title='Main Page'
ORDER BY old_timestamp DESC LIMIT 50;

+-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
| table | type | possible_keys | key           | key_len | ref         | rows | Extra                      |
+-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
| old   | ref  | old_namespace | old_namespace |     256 | const,const |    1 | where used; Using filesort |
+-------+------+---------------+---------------+---------+-------------+------+----------------------------+
| old   | ref  | old_namespace,name_title_timestamp | old_namespace |     256 | const,const |    1 | where used; Using filesort |

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from_name: Pedro M.V.

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>
To: <wikitech-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 12:05 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiktionary

Pedro M.V. wrote:

>I suspect that "wikionary" would be more of a problem for people than
"wiktionary" if their language is one that has a "t" in dictionary.

It?s to remark the WIKI prefix. And it?s not cacaphonic.

>Nevertheless, I can see the problem for a Spanish speaking person who
uses a "diccionario".  The Spanish language version will not need to
have exactly the same name as the English Wiktionary.  There is already
prcedent for this in Wkikpedia.


body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller at gmx.de>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Is Giskart right? www.wikipedia.org

> > But, if there is an improvement to be made, I'm all for it.
>
> Well, the idea is to offer actual new features for the multilingual
> portal: multi language search

This sound great, but it?s interesting see how it will work ( perhaps using the user?s web-browser language preferences to offer deault searching and the option search in another languages too ??.

> multi language RC

Sorry, what it?s RC ???

> language file editing
> interface, what have you. This is, IIRC,

IRCC : perhaps --->>>"If I Recall/Remember Correctly ". Really, I need an acronym finder and I think this a must be in wikiland [[acron:IRCC]]

>currently the plan for "phase IV"
> of the software.

> Having phase III working properly is a requirement for starting work on
> phase IV,

Where can I see a summary about the phases and plans ??

Regards.


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www

body:
Anthere <anthere5 at yahoo.com> writes:

> --- wiki pedista <wikipedista at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Jimbo wrote:
> > ''I wonder what would happen if we unprotected the home page for a few
> > days, with the *express plan* of trying to do something more
> > international there?''
> >
> > No, I don't think that would do the trick. That is the Main Page of
> > the english wikipedia, it doesn't have to be multilingual (I think it
> > is international enough).  (I wasn't going to bring this up for a
> > while, but Jimbo asked)

> I wholeheartedly agree with you Astronomer !!!!
>
> The actual main page of the whole project should be
> english only ! These utterly irritating internationals
> should really feel happy enough we are putting
> international links everywhere to please them ! The
> main page could be *deeply damaged* (utterly destroyed
> ?) if anybody aside very trusted english sysops had
> the right to edit it !

Astronomer is totally right. The current Main Page is the Main Page of the
_English Wikipedia_ and should remain as it is.

<irony>
But we could move it to en.wikipedia.org and rotate the address
www.wikipedia.org weekly among all the wikipedias so it points one week to
the Main Page of the French, next week to the Spanish, then to the English
and so on until PhaseIV is ready.
</irony>

greetings,
elian
--
Unix -is- user friendly. It's just very selective about who its
friends are. And sometimes even best friends have fights.


body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 10:21 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Is Giskart right? www.wikipedia.org

> However, I *do* think it is a pretty minor issue, because RIGHT THERE
> AT THE TOP of www are the links to other languages.  I have not seen
> any concrete proposals that are actually much improvement to that.

The "generic link" proposal could be.

You can include a link to a language. Imagine a link to "domobots" :D  in Africaans doesn?t appears may, 2001. You can add a http://gen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domobot link in your page. If in June, 2001 there is not an article of domobots in your browser primary  language, you will redirected to your second prefered language (i.e. english ) to see the article in english

If in July 2001, theres is an article, you will be redirected to the africaans article.

And all this without change the link. The user selects the options, not the page writer ( web-master).

This is specially interesting for multilanguage pages.

Regards.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Donations?

body:
Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> I think there are quite a lot of people (not only Wikipedia-writers)
> who would like to give a (small) donation. Let me please know if
> there is gonna be some 'foundation' or something. Is there already
> some bank-account to transfer money to?

The foundation will be set up by the end of this month, and
tax-deductible status will follow as soon as the IRS paperwork is
done.

> Would it be too much trouble (as there is no 'foundation' yet) to
> gather some (smaller) amounts of money?

Maybe I'll just loan the machine to the project and then I can
get it back once the foundation has a bank account and money to
buy an even better one later on.

But I'm planning to just give the current wikipedia machine to
the foundation outright.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Hardware inventory

body:
Jason and I are taking stock of our hardware, and I'm going to find a
secondary machine to devote exclusively to doing apache for wikipedia,
i.e. with no other websites on it or anything.  I'll loan the machine
to the Wikipedia Foundation until the Foundation has money to buy a
new machine later on this year.

We'll keep the MYSQL where it is, on the powerful machine.  The new
machine will be no slouch, either.

Today is Friday, and I think we'll have to wait for Jason to take a
trip to San Diego next week sometime (or the week following) to get
this all setup.  (The machine I have in mind is actually in need of
minor repair right now.)

By having this new machine be exclusively wikipedia, I can give the
developers access to it, which is a good thing.

This will *not* involve a "failover to read-only" mechanism, I guess,
but then, it's still going to be a major improvement -- such a
mechanism is really a band-aid on a fundamental problem, anyway.

------

Lots of people think it's a good thing to set up mirror servers all
over the Internet.  It's really not that simple.  There are issues of
organizational trust with user data, issues with network latency, etc.
Some things should be decentralized, some things should be
centralized.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Giving Jan access

body:
Let's give Jan access to whatever he needs, a developer account on the
machine, whatever.  He's good, and his advice will be priceless.

Ian Gilfillan, author of Mastering MySQL 4, has also volunteered to
help, and if he wants access, we can give it to him too, even though I
don't know him.  He wrote a book, so he's legit.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Optimizing suggestions

in_reply_to: <1044616176.3411.19.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 03:09:36AM -0800

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Now I've got to get back to my paper; if anyone sees me online in the
> next few hours, please intervene. :)

Brion, go to your room right now!

I, too, will be offline for a few hours.  I have to clean up my office
before my mom comes to visit.  You'd all be horrified to see how I live.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Optimizing suggestions

body:
On ven, 2003-02-07 at 02:49, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
> I'm fairly new to wikipedia and think it's an amazing project. Congrats to
> all involved! I've been hit with the speed problems though, so I've been
> following the optimization discussions from afar and may be able to
> contribute somewhat. I'm hoping to have some more time to help out with
> optimizing as I've got quite a bit of experience in the field (at least I've
> just written a MySQL book, so people think I do).

Wonderful! Any advice you can give would certainly be welcome.

> I was quite surprised to read that the web and database server are on the
> same machine. Simply separating these two (even for 2 equivalent slower
> machines) which you llook like you're going to do, has usually made a
> noticeable difference, allowing the machines to do both jobs optimally
> rather than hopping about trying to do both. Definitely put the mysql server
> on the better machine.

Jimbo, listen to this man: he speaks things that are true! :)

> Another fairly easy thing you can do to cut out the slow queries is to
> activate slow query logging. This only logs 'slow' queries and you can
> quickly tell quite a lot from this, and work on these queries as a priority.

I've had this on a couple times in the past, but seem to have forgot to
put the option into the bootup scripts. I'll start it up again and show
off a current slow log at the end of the day.

While we're speaking of slow queries, I'll just mention on the list a
couple tweaks I've done (not in CVS as sourceforge CVS is down): I
noticed that some of our slow queries were the Allpages list, which does
a sort on both namespace & title which we have only as separate indices.
For the meantime I've changed it to sort only on title, which saves a
huge sorting step. A composite index should be added later.

Also, the generator for the RSS feed of the last 10 changes was dog
slow. I've set it to use the Recentchanges table, which has rather sped
it up.

[snip]
> I'd also like to take a look at the my.cnf file as
> well, if that's possible, as well as know the hardware of the db server.
> That's something that can be optimized quite quickly, and may help a bit, if
> it's not been done already.

That would be *great*. The switches are dark voodoo to me.

2-CPU Athlon MP1700+
2GB ram
Single hard disk (SCSI; some IBM model, I forget exactly. 10000rpm)
OS: Red Hat Linux 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7)

I've posted our my.cnf to this list before but I can't find it at the
moment. Attached is the current one.

Now I've got to get back to my paper; if anyone sees me online in the
next few hours, please intervene. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
# Example mysql config file for large systems.
#
# This is for large system with memory = 512M where the system runs mainly
# MySQL.
#
# You can copy this file to
# /etc/my.cnf to set global options,
# mysql-data-dir/my.cnf to set server-specific options (in this
# installation this directory is /usr/local/mysql/var) or
# ~/.my.cnf to set user-specific options.
#
# One can in this file use all long options that the program supports.
# If you want to know which options a program support, run the program
# with --help option.

# The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients
[client]
#password	= your_password
port		= 3306
socket		= /tmp/mysql.sock

# Here follows entries for some specific programs

# The MySQL server
[mysqld]
port		= 3306
socket		= /tmp/mysql.sock
skip-locking
set-variable	= key_buffer=384M
set-variable	= max_allowed_packet=1M
set-variable	= table_cache=256
# table_cache was 256; were seeing opened_tables up to 918 or so
set-variable	= sort_buffer=8M
#sortbuffer was 1M
set-variable	= record_buffer=4M
set-variable	= myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M
#myisam sort buffer was 128M
set-variable	= max_connections=250
set-variable	= thread_cache=8
# Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency
set-variable	= thread_concurrency=4
log-bin
server-id	= 1

# Uncomment the following if you are using BDB tables
#set-variable	= bdb_cache_size=64M
#set-variable	= bdb_max_lock=100000

# Uncomment the following if you are using Innobase tables
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:1000M:autoextend
innodb_data_home_dir = /usr/local/mysql/var/
innodb_log_group_home_dir = /usr/local/mysql/var/
innodb_log_arch_dir = /usr/local/mysql/var/
set-variable = innodb_mirrored_log_groups=1
set-variable = innodb_log_files_in_group=3
set-variable = innodb_log_file_size=5M
set-variable = innodb_log_buffer_size=8M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
innodb_log_archive=0
#set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=16M
set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=384M
#set-variable = innodb_buffer_pool_size=512M
set-variable = innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=2M
set-variable = innodb_file_io_threads=4
set-variable = innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50

# Point the following paths to different dedicated disks
#tmpdir		= /tmp/
#log-update 	= /path-to-dedicated-directory/hostname

[mysqldump]
quick
set-variable	= max_allowed_packet=16M

[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
# Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL
#safe-updates

[isamchk]
set-variable	= key_buffer=128M
set-variable	= sort_buffer=128M
set-variable	= read_buffer=2M
set-variable	= write_buffer=2M

[myisamchk]
set-variable	= key_buffer=128M
set-variable	= sort_buffer=128M
set-variable	= read_buffer=2M
set-variable	= write_buffer=2M

[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout
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from_name: Pieter Suurmond

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Donations?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> I don't know if Jimbo can spare two machines, though. (Anyone care to make
> a donation? Not a tax write-off as the foundation isn't set up yet,
> but if you're addicted to Wikipedia and your time is valuable to you...)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Sounds interesting Brion,

I think there are quite a lot of people (not only Wikipedia-writers) who
would like to give a (small) donation. Let me please know if there is
gonna be some 'foundation' or something. Is there already some bank-account
to transfer money to?
Would it be too much trouble (as there is no 'foundation' yet) to gather
some (smaller) amounts of money?

Thanks to all you volunteers, software-developers, maintainance-people and
'hackers' :-),
Pieter


subject: [Wikitech-l] Read-only mirror

body:
> over occasionally. I'm uncertain what kind of granularity we can get
> with MySQL's replication; can we leave out the user table (in whole or
> in part) for instance? Not a big deal if it's just to another of Jimbo's
> machines, but I'd be leery of shipping e-mail addresses and password
> hashes over the internet to a third-party mirror site.

mysql supports ssl-encryption, so.... this should't be a problem.

> Notes; I'm not sure how much bandwidth would be required just for
> database traffic, or for updates. I'll check into that tonight. If it's
> within an internal network, it shouldn't be a problem.

it's about twice the real data, but mysql and ssh supports compression!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
Hi Jimbo!

> I guess if we wanted to do something like this, we'd have to find a
> license that solves some really important problem.  I don't know what
> the Creative Commons license here is supposed to have as an advantage.

The advantage would be that people using the Attribution-ShareAlike
licence whould be able to use our works. I'm pretty sure the creative
commons licences will be widely used, because it's easy to understand
how they work. The modular construction system is a good idea and it's
representation by logos is so, too.

But I can see that dual licensing whould complicate things for
contributors, and it might not be worth the trouble. I just wanted to
bring this to our attention, because if we wanted to dual licence our
articles we'd better do it sooner than later.

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Giving Jan access

body:
On ven, 2003-02-07 at 06:25, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
> Also:
> set-variable = innodb_log_file_size=5M
>
> This can go up to around 25% of the innodb_buffer_pool_size. Saves a bit of
> disk I/O (at the cost of recovery speed after a crash)

I did at one point try to increase this, but got an error on startup
about the log file not being the expected size and ended up changing it
back. (Sorry, I don't have the exact error message at hand -- for
shame!)

Is there any trick to fiddling with this setting?

(Just checked in to turn on the slow query logging now that the backup
dump run is finished. Back to the grindstone...)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Giving Jan access

body:
Jimbo wrote:

>Ian Gilfillan, author of Mastering MySQL 4, has also volunteered to
>help, and if he wants access, we can give it to him too, even though I
>don't know him.  He wrote a book, so he's legit.

There's no better source of legitimacy, in my eyes.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
--------------------------------


from_name: Olrick

body:
On 06 Feb 2003 23:12:52 -0800
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> Off the top of my head; what if the random queue listed *every* page;
> each page would be queued when it was created (and removed if deleted or
> changed to non-"article" state), and associated with a random index
> number. When asked to view a random page, we sort on the random index
> column (which would be indexed!) and take the lowest number; then assign
> that same article a new random index.
>
> This wouldn't require the occasional delay to refill the queue, and
> since the random index would be indexed, retrieval should be quick
> enough even with a large number of articles.

Sounds good, but then why not put the random index field directly into the
'cur' table ? It would allow to completely remove the random queue table.

--
Olrick


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] dual licence?

body:
You can start a "grass-roots" dual licensing campaign; there is no need
for a project-wide policy change. Simply convince Wikipedians to
release their contributions under a second license and to put a
statement to that effect on their user page.

In that case, I would argue for straight public domain as the second
"license". It's the only way to cut through the maze of slightly
incompatible free/open/creative commons licenses that is bound to
become almost as stifling as standard proprietary copyrights. Throw
fair-use materials in the mix and it becomes an utter mess to sort out
who can use what.

Your GFDL contributions will fall into the public domain 70 years after
your death anyway. Why wait? Why not release them right now? I found
the idea quite liberating, actually.

Axel

__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
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from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] quick software question...

body:
Does the current software have a quick mechanism to make the site
read-only?

Also, is there anything that would make it easy to have "articles and
searching only".  That is, no user logins or anything fancy, just the
ability to read the articles and search through them.

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www and Troph�es du Libre

body:
 tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:

elian wrote:

>
>Astronomer is totally right. The current Main Page is the Main Page of the
>_English Wikipedia_ and should remain as it is.
>
yup

>
>
>But we could move it to en.wikipedia.org and rotate the address
>www.wikipedia.org weekly among all the wikipedias so it points one week to
>the Main Page of the French, next week to the Spanish, then to the English
>and so on until PhaseIV is ready.
>
>
>
I actually like this idea!

Yeah me too :-)

I apologize for having been ironic.

I had the following thoughts.

Suppose a sysop should be seen function-oriented.

This implies duties, more than rights. Watching for vandalism, reverting damage, banning undesirable elements, welcoming newcomers, cleaning-up behind them, explaining how things work, cooling off problematic editors. It should not give benefits in the sense of having editing rights that others don't have.

In particular, they should not use their position to edit pages over which there is an edit war, especially when they are involved. And I cannot figure why they should have the right to edit protected pages when regular editors cannot.

I was told protected pages were protected because often the aim of vandals. Well, there are enough sysops to ban vandals, and enough contributors to revert vandalized pages on the english wiki.

So, I see not why the main page is protected, and I see not why regular editors cannot edit it, in the *wiki spirit* ("you can edit this page, now").

Suppose a sysop should be seen person-oriented.

This implies the sysop is someone trusted by others to bring beneficial input to the project. In reverse, that has somehow a light implication than others are not entirely so.

--------------

Some months ago, somebody (sorry, I don't remember who) raised the topic of "Les troph?es du Libre".

I know some consider it a very french matter, so to be raised only on the french wiki. I am just raising it because I could reach other french-speaking who could have missed the discussion, and feel like getting involved.

When the subject of Les Troph?es du Libre was raised, I said I could maybe take care of it. I wondered which page would be more suited to be indicated as the main entrance for the whole project. I wondered whether it had better be the french wiki only, or whether it would have a better impact to give the english page adress (or both if possible).

I think today the french wiki is bigger, nicer (phase III, and new homepage design) than it was at that time. So, the french address is probably the best one.

Still, it seems to me that giving just the address of the french wiki would be a misrepresentation of the international coverage of the project. So, why not also give the english main page adress ?

Well...it seems to me it would be rather a poor approach to present a project as being open to edition to *anybody* in the "wiki way", and then have to admit that "it is not true".

The english main page is the one of the english wiki, and should stay in english of course, but as long as we have no common address to present the whole project, it is also a little bit the general page. And some doors are better opened than closed.

I will have very little time on my hands till beginning of march. Plus, I am no developer. So, I will not register us to Les Troph?es du Libre (registration to be done BEFORE THE 15TH OF FEBRUARY). I raised the issue in our favorite "lieu de perdition" on the french wiki, but nobody seems to be interested in taking the time to do it. Any candidate to take care of that please ?

---------------------------------
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body:
 tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:

elian wrote:

>
>Astronomer is totally right. The current Main Page is the Main Page of the
>_English Wikipedia_ and should remain as it is.
>
yup

>
>
>But we could move it to en.wikipedia.org and rotate the address
>www.wikipedia.org weekly among all the wikipedias so it points one week to
>the Main Page of the French, next week to the Spanish, then to the English
>and so on until PhaseIV is ready.
>
>
>
I actually like this idea!

Yeah me too :-)

I apologize for having been ironic.

I had the following thoughts.

Suppose a sysop should be seen function-oriented.

This implies duties, more than rights. Watching for vandalism, reverting damage, banning undesirable elements, welcoming newcomers, cleaning-up behind them, explaining how things work, cooling off problematic editors. It should not give benefits in the sense of having editing rights that others don't have.

In particular, they should not use their position to edit pages over which there is an edit war, especially when they are involved. And I cannot figure why they should have the right to edit protected pages when regular editors cannot.

I was told protected pages were protected because often the aim of vandals. Well, there are enough sysops to ban vandals, and enough contributors to revert vandalized pages on the english wiki.

So, I see not why the main page is protected, and I see not why regular editors cannot edit it, in the *wiki spirit* ("you can edit this page, now").

Suppose a sysop should be seen person-oriented.

This implies the sysop is someone trusted by others to bring beneficial input to the project. In reverse, that has somehow a light implication than others are not entirely so.

--------------

Some months ago, somebody (sorry, I don't remember who) raised the topic of "Les troph?es du Libre".

I know some consider it a very french matter, so to be raised only on the french wiki. I am just raising it because I could reach other french-speaking who could have missed the discussion, and feel like getting involved.

When the subject of Les Troph?es du Libre was raised, I said I could maybe take care of it. I wondered which page would be more suited to be indicated as the main entrance for the whole project. I wondered whether it had better be the french wiki only, or whether it would have a better impact to give the english page adress (or both if possible).

I think today the french wiki is bigger, nicer (phase III, and new homepage design) than it was at that time. So, the french address is probably the best one.

Still, it seems to me that giving just the address of the french wiki would be a misrepresentation of the international coverage of the project. So, why not also give the english main page adress ?

Well...it seems to me it would be rather a poor approach to present a project as being open to edition to *anybody* in the "wiki way", and then have to admit that "it is not true".

The english main page is the one of the english wiki, and should stay in english of course, but as long as we have no common address to present the whole project, it is also a little bit the general page. And some doors are better opened than closed.

I will have very little time on my hands till beginning of march. Plus, I am no developer. So, I will not register us to Les Troph?es du Libre (registration to be done BEFORE THE 15TH OF FEBRUARY). I raised the issue in our favorite "lieu de perdition" on the french wiki, but nobody seems to be interested in taking the time to do it. Any candidate to take care of that please ?

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia on CD: searching?

body:
--- Erik Moeller <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de> wrote:

> Of course, having quarterly Wikipedia CDs or DVDs would also
> be damn cool.

I know that I asked this question before, but I don't remember whether
we found a satisfying answer. How should the searching be handled once
we distribute a static HTML tree on CD? Is there anything better than a
javascript hack? Distribute a personal web server along with the files?
What do other projects do in this situation?

Axel

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from_name: Jan Hidders

subject: [Wikitech-l] [brion@pobox.com: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Problem with "User Contributions"]

body:
On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 09:51:36AM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
> On 5 Feb 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > However a very active user who becomes inactive, and falls out of
> > recentchanges, would still be slow to query. Jan and Lars have suggested
> > using compound indexes which include the timestamp fields _and_ the user
> > fields so it can both select and sort using the index, and that sounds
> > reasonable in a sick sort of database-logic way. :)
>
> Might it be possible to store all changes _already sorted_ by date? Then one
> could just show the first 50 (or last 50 depending on sort order) hits
> without the need of any further selection or sorting.

If you have the proper indices they are sorted in in the result in that
order anyway. I'm still hoping that Brion will let me get my hands on the
database-design and some of the SQL, because it is all rather .. er ..
suboptimal. :-)

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] quick software question...

body:
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Jason Richey wrote:
> Does the current software have a quick mechanism to make the site
> read-only?

Yes, there's a special file under the uploads directory such that if it
exists, the wiki is in read-only mode. Someone logged in with developer
access can switch it in and out via special pages; or it can be manually
created/deleted. The location and name of the file are set in
LocalSettings.php.

> Also, is there anything that would make it easy to have "articles and
> searching only".  That is, no user logins or anything fancy, just the
> ability to read the articles and search through them.

Read-only mode blocks logins IIRC, but if someone is already logged in it
doesn't ignore their cookies.

To disable many of the special pages, set $wgMiserMode = true in
LocalSettings; and probably change the message in language*.php. Hmm,
though it might be useful to remove them from the menus to.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Axel Boldt wrote:
> I know that I asked this question before, but I don't remember whether
> we found a satisfying answer. How should the searching be handled once
> we distribute a static HTML tree on CD? Is there anything better than a
> javascript hack? Distribute a personal web server along with the files?

Several thoughts:

* Rather than a static HTML tree (which will grow too big for a CD without
compression sooner or later), store compressed and indexed wikitext, and
distribute it with a dedicated reader, which will have a search mechanism
built in to it. (Related to or the same as a dedicated writer... see
discussions on meta)

* A Java hack

* Write a helper program to do searching, include compiled versions for
major platforms. (But how to integrate with browser?)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www

body:
elian wrote:

>
>Astronomer is totally right. The current Main Page is the Main Page of the
>_English Wikipedia_ and should remain as it is.
>
yup

>
><irony>
>But we could move it to en.wikipedia.org and rotate the address
>www.wikipedia.org weekly among all the wikipedias so it points one week to
>the Main Page of the French, next week to the Spanish, then to the English
>and so on until PhaseIV is ready.
></irony>
>
>
I actually like this idea!


subject: [Wikitech-l] LALR?

body:
I haven't heard anything new about getting a more powerful parser
together.  Have I missed anything?

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hardware inventory

body:
On Fre, 2003-02-07 at 11:56, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Lots of people think it's a good thing to set up mirror servers all
> over the Internet.  It's really not that simple.  There are issues of
> organizational trust with user data, issues with network latency, etc.
> Some things should be decentralized, some things should be
> centralized.

Mirroring wiki in a meaningful sense (i.e. read/write) is not practical.
However, a read-only mirror (which wouldn't need the user database) is
fairly easy to set up, in fact, I might run one myself eventually if
just to have faster access to the Wikipedia information. Of course,
having quarterly Wikipedia CDs or DVDs would also be damn cool.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


body:
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> Technical question: I'm considering 'stealing' some wikipedia-source
> (to mirror it on my own server) by generating queries like
> "http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Chemistry&action=edit"
...
> so is there maybe a simpler way to retrieve wikisources?

This is planned; see
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-friendly_wiki_interface

> 	If CD-ROM becomes outdated one maybe can use it as a shaving-mirror
> 	instead of a Wikipedia-mirror :-)

;)  Another reason in favor of a 'smart' program that can download updates
and seamlessly jump between the versions on disc and the new updated
versions.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Ian Gilfillan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Optimizing suggestions

body:
Hi

I'm fairly new to wikipedia and think it's an amazing project. Congrats to
all involved! I've been hit with the speed problems though, so I've been
following the optimization discussions from afar and may be able to
contribute somewhat. I'm hoping to have some more time to help out with
optimizing as I've got quite a bit of experience in the field (at least I've
just written a MySQL book, so people think I do).

I was quite surprised to read that the web and database server are on the
same machine. Simply separating these two (even for 2 equivalent slower
machines) which you llook like you're going to do, has usually made a
noticeable difference, allowing the machines to do both jobs optimally
rather than hopping about trying to do both. Definitely put the mysql server
on the better machine.

Another fairly easy thing you can do to cut out the slow queries is to
activate slow query logging. This only logs 'slow' queries and you can
quickly tell quite a lot from this, and work on these queries as a priority.

MySQL 4 would make sense as an upgrade. It's more than stable enough on any
*nix platforms, and has some substantial advantages as some of you have
pointed out already.

I haven't really had a look at the code, so I'm not sure how relevant all
this is, but mirroring pages makes a lot of sense, and takes unecessary load
off the database. The front page, and all articles, should be available at
high speed (this at least gives newcomers.something to see even if the db is
churning in the background). If the front page needs to do any database
queries, then mirror it as a static page every x minutes, much more
efficient than doing the query hundreds of times a minute. You could mirror
individual articles, but I'd need to look at the code and usage to see if
this will help.

Hopefully I'll be able to help out more, but these are just some thoughts
that may be useful to think about for now. Apologies if they're not relevant
because I haven't taken a close enough look at the details. I'll hopefully
be able to dive in soon. I'd also like to take a look at the my.cnf file as
well, if that's possible, as well as know the hardware of the db server.
That's something that can be optimized quite quickly, and may help a bit, if
it's not been done already.

regards,
ian gilfillan


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] front page of www and Trophées du Libre

body:
Anthere wrote:
> This implies duties, more than rights. Watching for vandalism,
>reverting damage, banning undesirable elements, welcoming newcomers,
>cleaning-up behind them, explaining how things work, cooling off
>problematic editors. It should not give benefits in the sense of
>having editing rights that others don't have.

This is more or less consistent with my view, especially this part:

> In particular, they should not use their position to edit pages over
>which there is an edit war,

That's right.  We're not supposed to use sysop powers "on the
battlefield".  The nature of wiki -- absolute equality in editing --
is the great equalizer that forces NPOV on us all.  Only in
extraordinary circumstances (bans of people who just won't co-operate,
repeatedly) does this not work out.

> especially when they are involved. And I
>cannot figure why they should have the right to edit protected pages
>when regular editors cannot.

Well, generally, the only reason to have protected pages like the
homepage is that it's such a tempting target for vandalism.  And sysop
powers are not a special privilege handed out to a few, they are open
for anyone who asks.  Basically, as long as you're known to not be a
vandal, you can have sysop powers.

> So, I see not why the main page is protected, and I see not why
>regular editors cannot edit it, in the *wiki spirit* ("you can edit
>this page, now").

If you want to edit it, in the wiki spirit, just have someone set your
sysop flag.

But, of course, there's a certain tradition of how it has been done --
not absolutely binding, of course -- and sudden changes are likely to
upset people.

--Jimbo


body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Distributing any code to be run on client machine is really bad
> idea.

If you're going to say that someone's idea is "really bad", you should
give a "really good" reason why this is so...

I can see that some difficulties might arise from creating programs to
run client-side, but I can also see that such a thing would be
somewhat useful to many users.

I am also of the opinion that everyone who would work on such a
project would be doing so on a volunteer basis with an interest
towards building the wikipedia community stronger.  I don't see the
harm in that.  I would expect you of all people to recognize that it
is somewhat frustrating when someone tells you that your idea sucks.

> A bit of Javascript to do searching in some index is about as much
> as can be reasonably done. Distributing renderer is really really bad idea.

Likewise, I was expecting to see a "really really good" reason here...

> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: 'database dump'?

body:
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Pieter Suurmond wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
> > Did you consider downloading the database dump? Link is on the Main Page...
>
> Sorry but I cannot find any 'database dump' on http://www.wikipedia.org/
> or on meta.

Here it is:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jesse Alter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l digest, Vol 1 #123 - 15 msgs

body:
Apparently, the issue with Lir is a bit deeper than I thought, and I do
side with some of the people offended by her--some of the comments were
sharp and a bit 'unladylike' (for the record, I think men and women
should both behave 'ladylike' in polite company). But one of the things
that really got me was where Zoe said she would leave if Lir was
unbanned and 'continued his usual obnoxiousness'. That's not cool. Now
you're adding some more emotion to the admin's decisions. Now they must
worry if it is worthwhile to add Lir if they'd be losing you, and that's
really unfair. The decision should be made based on whether the admins
feel it would help Wikipedia, overall.

/


body:
--- Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote:

> * Rather than a static HTML tree (which will grow too big for a CD
> without compression sooner or later), store compressed and indexed
> wikitext, and distribute it with a dedicated reader, which will have
> a search mechanism built in to it.

Since we probably don't want to write a whole renderer though, maybe we
should start with Mozilla as display engine. Does Mozilla allows search
plugins that are more intelligent then just handing the request off to
some website?

> * A Java hack

I don't think a Java applet can return the search results in the form
of an HTML page though. Maybe a separate standalone Java program that
somehow communicates with a browser?

It seems like such a generic problem, somebody must have solved it
before.

Axel

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from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 14:14, Jesse Alter wrote:
> Apparently, the issue with Lir is a bit deeper than I thought, and I do
> side with some of the people offended by her--some of the comments were
> sharp and a bit 'unladylike' (for the record, I think men and women
> should both behave 'ladylike' in polite company). But one of the things
> that really got me was where Zoe said she would leave if Lir was
> unbanned and 'continued his usual obnoxiousness'. That's not cool. Now
> you're adding some more emotion to the admin's decisions. Now they must
> worry if it is worthwhile to add Lir if they'd be losing you, and that's
> really unfair. The decision should be made based on whether the admins
> feel it would help Wikipedia, overall.
>
Just so you know, the only admin (in this sense) is Jimbo. He'll take
other people's opinions under advisement, but there isn't a group of
admins making a decision on whether Lir/Adam/Bridget/Vera Cruz should be
allowed to participate in Wikipedia.

I don't think it was unreasonable for Zoe to say that she'd leave if Lir
was unbanned. I don't think she's lying. Weighing the impact of Lir on
the rest of the community's participation is exactly the task that must
be done when considering him.

--tc