in_reply_to:
<bklmkf$7kk$1@sea.gmane.org>;
	from jimg5@optonline.net on Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 10:26:13PM -0400

body:
I generally agree with this analysis, and I also think that when we do
move to a round-robin or similar load balancing situation, we will
have much more capacity than would be linearly predicted by the
addition of one extra machine.  Like JDG, this is based on my own
experience, although not with the 17th busiest website in the world.
:-)

JDG wrote:

> Hopefully I have the right list now...
>
> I was a developer a while back for the (purportedly) 17th busiest website in
> the world and though the sysadmins were more directly involved in improving
> response speed, I ended up doing a lot of stuff myself. The way that
> Wikipedia is slow is very similar to problems we had. The delays are almost
> all in the initial request for new pages. Once the connection is made,
> content usually comes across rapidly. This usually points to some sort of
> full queue in software, or a full queue due to excessive connections on a
> single machine causing a hardware wait state. New url requests are made to
> stand in line, sometimes because settings for maximum simultaneous
> connections are too low, or the settings are high enough but all RAM is
> consumed servicing current requests, etc,. This may seem obvious, but it
> lets us de-emphasize other potential problems such as bloated overworked DB,
> bogged disk fetches, etc. So, based on all this, I would say the greatest
> single improvement would be to set up some sort of simple DNS round robin
> (true load balancing could come later). I'm not sure what your current
> server setup is, but if you could have at least two Apache servers running
> on two machines with one of them running the Round Robin algorithm I think
> the majority of your response problems would disappear. Don't listen to
> those who say Round Robin is a naive approach. It's true that allocation of
> new connections is done in a "dumb" way (in a two server setup it will just
> throw every other connection to the secondary webserver)-- but that's all
> you really need, I think. Suddenly each machine is servicing half the client
> connections and everything is fast... Of course, maybe the reasons for your
> slowness are more complex, but based on what I can see from the client side
> my suspicion is that a simple Round Robin would clear it all up and that
> simply adding new Apache processes on new servers as you grow would make you
> at least 10 times faster during peak times than at present. -- JDG --
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Break

body:
--- cprompt <cprompt at tmbg.org> wrote:
> hehe..that was meant to be offlist to Adam. Before I
> get lashed (as I
> should be), I knew that I shouldn' tbe using the
> word jerk. A better
> phrase would be "playing devil's advocate", which is
> more at what Steve
> seemed to be doing, with the what-if scenarios and
> arguing for NPOV,
> even if others didn't deem it to be NPOV. I felt
> that Adam would
> interpret it as light-hearted as I meant it, but I
> don't think that
> others on the list would feel that way.
>
> Attached is a JPG of how red my face is! :-)
> (#FF0000, i think)

I don't think he's playing devil's advocate. I'm
discussing Israel offlist with him and he seems to
really hate it genuinely. (He's not anti-semetic,
though)
LDan

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikipedia-l] (no subject)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] (no subject)

body:
Oups sorry, made a mistake

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constans, Camille (C.C.) [mailto:cconsta4 at ford.com]
> Sent: 22 September 2003 14:48
> To: 'wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org'
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] (no subject)
>
>
> http://www.dpreview.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

in_reply_to:
<3F6C692E.23145.2B30C3@localhost>;
	from a.crossman@blueyonder.co.uk on Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at
	02:50:22PM +0100

body:
Allan Crossman wrote:
> So, is this happening? What username is Adam editing under?

He told me that he prefers 'Lir'.  I don't know what he's
actually going to use.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

in_reply_to:
<8uDKCCwhpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 05:20:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Contrary to his promise to use the name "Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]",

To be clear, he never promised to use that name.  I just said that I
would let him back under that name.  Later, even though he didn't ask
for it, it occurred to me that I just wanted him to pick a name and
stick to it.  He told me that he prefers Lir.

> Adam is again editing under the name Pizza Puzzle, after he has lied
> to Jimbo about not having used that name in the past. (Jimbo has
> been in denial about this since it was first brought up.)

Well, sort of.  :-) I deliberately chose to give him the benefit of
the doubt.  After the last time I did, he wrote to me and admitted
that he is Pizza Puzzle, after all.

"Children live for attention and they love exaggerated emotional
responses. Attention is stimulation.  Whether that attention is good
or bad, it is stimulating and they like it.  The idea behind
Extinction is that you do not reinforce undesirable behavior by giving
the child a reward for their bad behaviors -- the reward being
attention and an exaggerated emotional response."

Adam is not a child, but I chose to just ignore this aspect of things,
because we were making good progress otherwise.

I ask everyone to try to be supportive and welcoming to him, because
it's the best hope for healing the past wounds.  It may not work, of
course.  But, we can try.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Welcome back Adam

in_reply_to:
<1064074169.1762.0.camel@chai.snacksoft.com>;
	from cprompt@tmbg.org on Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 04:09:29PM +0000

body:
cprompt wrote:
> Speaking of consistency, I'm not sure if he reads this list anymore, but
> he told me that he's planning on requesting the password for "Lir" and
> using that, since it was his original username. I think he might be
> using Pizza Puzzle in the interim.

That sounds likely.


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggestion for better response times

body:
Thank you! That was very informing.

I think the most interesting diagrams are on the top left and the bottom
right, which compares unlimited concurrency to a concurrency level of 1.
It looks indeed as if the average response times with locking are kept
the same by a large increase in maximum time.

However, I believe this phenomena is completely due to the quick-n-dirty
lock implementation. It is not starvation free, and if no locks are
available (as will often be the case with a concurrency level of 1)
every client process will sleep for a second before trying again. This
delay is likely the full cause of the lack of decrease in average
response times.

With a better lock implementation, we should be able to avoid the jump
in median time as shown in the lower right diagram, as well as reduce
the average time significantly, until it approaches the new median.

If this is the case, the average response times with 50 simultaneous
clients could be reduced from about 5000 ms to about 100 ms by using a
better lock. Probably would even a "worse" lock do well, by simply
reducing the retry delay. It would be interesting with a benchmark where
the delay "sleep(1)" has been replaced with a "usleep(100)".

/E23

Brion Vibber brion-at-pobox.com |wikipedia| wrote:

> My very naive quick testing shows that while there is an improvement in
> the median time when locking kicks in, there is no significant
> difference in average (mean) response time; the shorter times for some
> are paid for by a significant increase in the length and proportion of
> slow responses for others.
>
> See benchmark:
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_response_times
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/1/1d/Lock-times.png
>
> Of course, I could be doing something wrong, and this benchmark is very
> very naive, making no attempt to work with different types of requests.
>


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, E23 wrote:

> I've been following the discussions on the problems with the web
> servers. It seems that there are too many concurrent processes for the
> limited hardware we are currently using. I believe I read numbers
> somewhere of a steady load of 20+ processes in the run queue on one of
> the servers. Of course there will be a lot of context switching going
> on, with some overhead. But worse, it will guarantee that all processes
> get the worst possible total running time.
>
> Example: n processes arrive at the same time. If the necessary CPU time
> for every process is t seconds, all processes will finish after t*n
> seconds in a concurrent system.
>
> If, on the other hand, the processes run completely serialized, one
> after another, the first process will finish after t seconds, the second
> one after 2*t seconds and so on up to n*t seconds for the n:th process.
> This gives an average running time of t*n/2 seconds, with a worst case
> time of t*n.

This goes wrong on 2 counts:
1. If there is any amount of true parallellism going on, the time for n
   concurrent connections will be less than n*t seconds. If during the
   execution, there is time spent waiting for an answer from another
   machine, the amount of parallellism may well be large.
2. Processes may differ in necessary execution time. Doing them subsequently
   increases the amount of time that 'fast' processes have to wait for 'slow'
   processes. For example, running a 1 millisecond and a 10 millisecond
   process parallel will give 2 milliseconds for the fast, and 11 milliseconds
   for the slow process. If run in sequence, this will be (assuming that
   either process gets first 50% of the time) on average 5.5 milliseconds for
   the fast, and 10.5 milliseconds for the slow process.

Andre Engels


body:
On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> See benchmark:
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_response_times
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/1/1d/Lock-times.png
>
> Of course, I could be doing something wrong, and this benchmark is very
> very naive, making no attempt to work with different types of requests.

As I argued, using different types of request would probably give a worse
score for strict locking, because the faster processes have to wait for the
full execution of the slower ones. With two processes, there is loss rather
than gain even in the theoretical case when the slower process takes more than
3 times as much time as the faster one (if one process has time 1 and the other
time a>1, concurrent execution will give execution times of 2 and 1+a, average
1.5+0.5a, sequential execution will give average execution times of 1+0.5a and
a+0.5, average 0.75+0.75a).

Andre Engels


body:
Andre,

(This is an answer to both your posts)

Both your points in your first post are very true. The ideal concurrency
level is likely >1 on a real-world setup where requests vary widely in
resulting CPU time.

However, it's also likely much less than 20, which seems to be the
current case without concurrency control. The ideal level is probably
best determined by experimentation.

Regarding your second posting, there are a number of things one can do
to fine-tune this approach, when and if fine-tuning is deemed necessary.
One could for instance reserve a certain number of locks for known short
running requests (like page loads), assuring these will always be fast.
It's less important to ensure the speed of long running page executions,
like full text searches, since the user expects these to take more time.

/E23

Andre Engels engels-at-uni-koblenz.de |wikipedia| wrote:
>
> This goes wrong on 2 counts:
> 1. If there is any amount of true parallellism going on, the time for n
>    concurrent connections will be less than n*t seconds. If during the
>    execution, there is time spent waiting for an answer from another
>    machine, the amount of parallellism may well be large.
> 2. Processes may differ in necessary execution time. Doing them subsequently
>    increases the amount of time that 'fast' processes have to wait for 'slow'
>    processes. For example, running a 1 millisecond and a 10 millisecond
>    process parallel will give 2 milliseconds for the fast, and 11 milliseconds
>    for the slow process. If run in sequence, this will be (assuming that
>    either process gets first 50% of the time) on average 5.5 milliseconds for
>    the fast, and 10.5 milliseconds for the slow process.
>
> Andre Engels
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mirroring (was Re: Fundraising)

body:
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:

> I was suggesting making a read-only mirror by mirroring the database
> rather than just the HTML. Every time a page is updated on the main DB
> server, an update would automatically be sent to the mirror. It's a very
> simple method, which meets Daniel's requirements of short latency. The
> idea would be that the mirror would serve web pages by getting articles
> from its local copy of the database, rather than from the other side of
> the world or country or whatever.
>
> We could even set up a full read-write server on the other side of the
> world, and redirect users to a different domain name as they arrive,
> based on their location. Users could specify their preferred mirror in
> their user preferences. We could even make larousse the default for
> logged-in users, that way most edits go to a web server which is close
> to the master DB.

Would it not be better to keep the mirrors read-only, and have them redirect
to the master for write-access? To have writing in several places causes
significant overhead in avoiding edit conflicts and such.

Andre Engels


from_name: Steve Vertigum

subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> The RamBot was a bad idea, and the IsraelBot is too.
> Wikipedia articles should be generated individually,
> not en masse.
>
> A semi-reasonable compromise would be to tag the
> auto-generated entries
> so that they didn't show up in the site statistics,
> etc. That is, the'd
> act as preformatted resources for editors who wanted
> to create an entry
> on a town, but wouldn't be considered real entries.

Well, I understand this view-- how can any stats be
non-political.  Does this mean that we accept them
outright? I think that the RamBot was a great idea. A
pain in the butt on recent changes, but....

To have Native Americans argue about US cities is one
thing altogether-- those disputes were "settled" a
long time ago.

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Finishing up (loose ends)

body:
--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Stevertigo would like for you to say "These are
> politicized numbers
> from the murderous apartheid Jews".  But that isn't
> NPOV.  :-)

Although I understand Jimbo's desire to caste me as
Troll, I cant accept this-- and am disappointed in
Jimbos hastly, inappropriate, and slanted
characterization.  You must not have read my comments
well enough, Senor Wales.

> Others might argue, though, and legitimately, that
> the exact wording
> that you do choose should not inappropriately
> legitimize or validate
> the statistics beyond a level that would be
> uncontroversially accepted
> by reasonable partisans.

This is reasonable -- again, my last word on this
(only in response to the slander) was that there be
too many articles to edit by hand. Several hundred is
not such a number.

~S~

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my
religious convictions, a lie which is being
systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have
expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can
be called religious then it is the unbounded
admiration for the structure of the world so far as
our science can reveal it.-- Albert Einstein

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
Joachim Kerschbaumer wrote:
> I agree with you, and that was not the point. The point was: a user
> currently has just no way to check that his money was received
> somewhere.

I try to write a personal thank-you note, so far, to everyone who
contributes.  I think I have a few donation emails to write now, so
I'm a little behind in this.

> So one way to check would be the list with date/amount, even
> without name would be a help. Just to see "aha, it seems to have
> arrived".

Well, using Paypal, it's easy enough to check that your donation was
sent o.k.  When we are using other methods, it will be equally easy to
check, I think.  I mean, as easy to check as any other payment sent to
anyone.

> > For now at least, this info will have to be placed on a page on
> > meta. I think I heard that we have received about US$1,000 in
> > donations so far and that Jimbo put a couple thousand in the
> > account when he opened it.

> That is exactly what I am looking for. If you could make public this
> infos would be great.

In the bank account at Sun Trust Bank, there is approximately $2500,
plus or minus.  This is my initial deposit less any bank fees plus a
tiny deposit from PayPal.  (I could call for the exact balance, of
course, but it doesn't seem important at the moment.)

In the PayPal account, there are:
$586.50 U.S. dollars and
EUR $47.70
GBP 19.02

So, at the current conversion rate, that's $670.84.

I have deliberately not converted the EUR and GBP balances, for no
particular reason other than the fun of it, but I can convert them at
any time with a few clicks.

(I've been idly thinking that perhaps the EUR/GBP balances could be
used more directly for the benefit of European users at some point.
Even though I'm skeptical about the benefits of locating servers in
different parts of the world, I'm open to the idea if it's technically
desirable and would contribute to world harmony in some way.)

These contributions have come from 11 different people -- or 12, if
you count me.

--Jimbo


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
The RamBot was a bad idea, and the IsraelBot is too.
Wikipedia articles should be generated individually, not en masse.

A semi-reasonable compromise would be to tag the auto-generated entries
so that they didn't show up in the site statistics, etc. That is, the'd
act as preformatted resources for editors who wanted to create an entry
on a town, but wouldn't be considered real entries.

--tc


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
 >> I see-- and what treatment are you giving to towns
 >> which exist in violation of the various UN and
 >> US-Israel agreements over the years?
 >I've no idea whether they're in Adam's data or not, but if they >_exist_,
 >they _exist_ and this fact should be noted.

 >> Its only been the past couple months that Israel has
 >> bent to international pressure to dismantle a
 >> settlement -- how are you treating these? Are these
 >> registered as non-existent?  Are you adding the former
 >> Arabic names of towns, recently  and not-so recently
 >> incorporated into Israel?

 >Steve, do you *HAVE THIS DATA*?

 >If you *HAVE IT*, you can add it.

I have it! I have it! It is from http://www.allthatremains.com/ and I've
added it to
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_villages_during_the_1948_Arab-Israeli_war
But it was so much that it wasn't feasible to add it by hand so could I
also be assisted by a bot? Compare http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqrit
and http://www.allthatremains.com/Acre/Iqrit/index.html for an example.
So if that is the case do I have to program the bot myself or can I
lease one from someone?

BL


from_name: Jurriaan Schulman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Templates / duplication of information and meta data

body:
After writing some articles on animals I noticed two things which I would
like to discuss. I would like to know how I can help to improve them.

1) wikipedia seems to duplicate a lot of information which could be avoided.
2) there currently seems to be no way to change information in more than one
article at once.

I would like to give a few examples to illustrate this:

Ad 1: Most articles on animals use some kind of table, which is duplicated
for each article. Also, many articles may use the same references which are
duplicated on many pages. This is seen in a lot of other articles too and is
a huge waste of hard disk space and performance.

Ad 2: when I write many articles about closely related species, I may use
one article as a template and copy parts of it. If I discover a typo in this
copied part, I have to change it for each article by hand.
Another example would be if we decide to change the background colour of the
table used by most articles on animals. This may be no problem for a few
articles, yet with hundreds or thousands of articles it is a huge waste of
human resources.

The solution would probably be to use meta data. I tried to discuss this on
wikipedia, but the discussion was moved to feature requests. An argument
against the use of meta data and templates was that it would make it harder
to contribute to wikipedia. An Argument which I do not really understand.

So my real questions are: who is currently working on the database schema
for wikipedia and who decides if it would be useful to change this schema?

Cheers,

Jurriaan


from_name: John

subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>The RamBot was a bad idea, and the IsraelBot is too.
>Wikipedia articles should be generated individually, not en masse.
>
>A semi-reasonable compromise would be to tag the auto-generated entries
>so that they didn't show up in the site statistics, etc. That is, the'd
>act as preformatted resources for editors who wanted to create an entry
>on a town, but wouldn't be considered real entries.
>
>--tc
>
Your argument makes no sense. There are certain things simply taken as
facts that should be included in the Wikipedia. To wait for someone to
enter all these things by hand would take forever. A bot can enter the
data much more quickly and with a constantly consistent format for easy
reading. Sure, someone should go back and look at all these bot entrys
to add more information they might have from personal experience but to
not let bots seed the 'pedia with factual stubs first would lessen
Wikipedia's content.

As long as the information in a bot's stubs is factual, why not count it
in the site statistics?


from_name: Geoffrey Thomas

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Servers

body:
tarquin <tarquin*planetunreal?com> writes:
> Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
>
> >
> >             Server
> >
> >           Please feel free to use what I wrote about servers in any
> > way you like.  If you want to use it in am Encyclopedia article it
> > needs to be edited to remove the first person references and written
> > in the third person.
> >
> No, it's up to YOU to do this.
> If you want to write encyclopedia articles -- please do!
> Go to the Wikipedia site and start writing:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server
>
> But please stop posting irrelevant stuff to this list. As you may have
> noticed it is starting to annoy some people.

[[MeatBall:AssumeGoodFaith]]. I had asked in an earler e-mail if the text
can be added to [[WikiPedia:Servers]] - the article seemed a bit lacking
and his e-mail seemed a good starting point for non-technical people to
understand exactly what Wikimedia is buying.

[[User:Geoffrey]] Thomas

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from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
> We could even set up a full read-write server on the other side of the

> world, and redirect users to a different domain name as they arrive,
> based on their location.

Brilliant idea given the small number of writes (a few per minute) and
massive number of reads.  Put me on the list of folks with
computing/bandwidth willing to donate to this effort.

Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
Email: alih at hku.hk | Web: http://jmsc.hku.hk/


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Suggestion for better response times

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 18:29, E23 wrote:
>
>>Example: n processes arrive at the same time. If the necessary CPU time
>>for every process is t seconds, all processes will finish after t*n
>>seconds in a concurrent system.
>>
>>If, on the other hand, the processes run completely serialized, one
>>after another, the first process will finish after t seconds, the second
>>one after 2*t seconds and so on up to n*t seconds for the n:th process.
>>This gives an average running time of t*n/2 seconds, with a worst case
>>time of t*n.

Your formulas work as long as the processes are not waiting for hardware
at any stage. The apache processes don't, significantly, so that's okay.
You wouldn't want to try this with the DB though.

> My very naive quick testing shows that while there is an improvement in
> the median time when locking kicks in, there is no significant
> difference in average (mean) response time; the shorter times for some
> are paid for by a significant increase in the length and proportion of
> slow responses for others.
>
> See benchmark:
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_response_times
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/1/1d/Lock-times.png
>
> Of course, I could be doing something wrong, and this benchmark is very
> very naive, making no attempt to work with different types of requests.

Could we mitigate the effect of slow queries blocking the server, by
allowing other threads to run once the lock times out? I'm thinking
something like this:

for ( $semIdx=0;
   !wait_for_semaphore($semIdx) && $semIdx < 10;
   $semIdx++ );

if ( $sem == 10 ) {
   print "Sorry too much traffic\n";
} else {
   do query
   release_semaphore($semIdx);
}

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> It is important for our developers to have complete access to the servers that
> Wikimedia projects run on. Otherwise outages will be significantly longer and
> we would not have any way to fix things ourselves when it is the server that
> is the problem. Read only mirrors are a very real possibility but in order to
> get that to work we need somebody to code the functionality. Jimbo supports
> the idea of read only mirrors but somebody has to code that to make it happen
> in a near real time and seemless way. Any volunteers?

Me, me! :)

I've started working on DB replication. We should be able to set up a
remote slave server once I'm done. The MySQL manual says you can even
have slave servers connecting over a modem, just dialling up
occasionally to get the latest updates. So having one in a different
city or something shouldn't be a problem. There might be a few UI issues
  to sort out. I guess we'd have to set up a method of mirroring images
too.

-- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau>


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] EntmootsOfTrolls still causing severe problems

body:
It hasn't stopped. EntmootsOfTrolls is still harassing me.
A few days ago his comments libeled me as a criminal,
explicitly charging me with "criminal behavior".

Now he is trying to "out" me, by publicly using what he
believes to be my real name. (He is almost correct...yet
wrong. That's one of the problems when you out people. You
direct atatckers to the wrong victim.)

As you all know, most of us operate anonymously on
Wikipedia for a variety of reasons.  EoT's actions are a
violation of the trust that allows us to work together.

I have had enough of his attacks on me as a criminal,
enough of his one-man war against all of Wikipedia in his
quest to push leftist-anarchism, and his war against
historians and scholars of religion, and enough of his
unethical attempts to "out" anonymous people.  Most of us
certainly have had enough of the way that he copies, word
for word, entire Wikipedia articles, retitles them, and
then rewrites them here and there to fit his own religious
and political views, effectively setting up his own
enyclopedia-within-Wikipedia that is not peer-reviewed. (A
gross and blatant violation of all Wikipedia protocols.)

(And I really am surprised at the way someone here has been
encouraging him of late, which is really shocking as well
as disappointing.)

EoT is still out of control, and clearly nothing people
have said to him has made any difference at all. Precisely
what level of continued harassment from his will get him
banned?  Does he actually have to wreck the Wikipedia
server?

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
> John wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >The RamBot was a bad idea, and the IsraelBot is too.
> >Wikipedia articles should be generated individually, not en masse.
> >
> >A semi-reasonable compromise would be to tag the auto-generated
entries
> >so that they didn't show up in the site statistics, etc. That is,
the'd
> >act as preformatted resources for editors who wanted to create an
entry
> >on a town, but wouldn't be considered real entries.
> >
> >--tc
> >
> Your argument makes no sense. There are certain things simply taken as
> facts that should be included in the Wikipedia. To wait for someone to
> enter all these things by hand would take forever. A bot can enter the
> data much more quickly and with a constantly consistent format for
easy
> reading. Sure, someone should go back and look at all these bot entrys
> to add more information they might have from personal experience but
to
> not let bots seed the 'pedia with factual stubs first would lessen
> Wikipedia's content.
>
> As long as the information in a bot's stubs is factual, why not count
it
> in the site statistics?

Your argument, sir, makes as much sense as mine. The need for Wikipedia
seeding is highly debatable; and the advisability of doing it even more
debatable, as the more that bots are used, the less likely it is that
someone will go back and look at all those bot entries.

There should be a balance between encyclopedia size and contributor
participation--the best way to ensure that is to not auto-generate
entries.

My suggestion was to let bot-seeding happen, but for those seeds to
remain "hidden" until someone goes and looks for the information. Take,
for example, [[Leominster, Massachusetts]].

My proposal would be as follows:
1. If you went to [[Johnny Appleseed]], for example, the link to
Leominster would be in new-page or stub-link format (? or !), not a
standard link, until someone actually made a change other than the
Rambot entry.
2. If you click to that link, you see the Rambot content.
3. If you search for Leominster, the Rambot entry would show up in the
listing (perhaps tagged).
4. The page wouldn't count in the statistics until someone's made at
least one edit to the entry.

That way you get the benefit of the content-seeding without the
distortion of the size or intent of Wikipedia, even if hundreds of
thousands of such seedings are done.

There's also the side argument that all Rambot did was take information
that should be in tables and graphs and put it into paragraph form to
make it seem like Wikipedia style. It probably sould have done better
just to supply the tables and graphs for eventual inclusion in real
entries about the towns.


from_name: Rick

body:
He has recently threatened to turn over RK's name to various militant Islamic organizations on [[Talk:Militant Islam]].  This threat is should be taken as seriously as any other death threats that have been posted on Wikipedia, and should cause immediate banning of the user under all variations.  RickK

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subject: [WikiEN-l] 143.93.17.21 spam

body:
Continue to revert.  RickK

Eric Demolli <demolli at unice.fr> wrote:

User 143.93.17.21 is adding a reference to summer seminars at the European
Graduate School in many articles (mainly related to film director).
I think this is mainly advertising and I have reverted some. What's your
advice.

Ericd

_______________________________________________
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body:
Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:

> Sorry for my newbies question, but there's something i dont understand. Many web site around the world have only one DB server and many load balancing web server. Slashdot for example IIRC. Ok it must be a quadri processor... but it's very fast !
>
> I'm not really sure, that pliny is the bottleneck.
>
> The Larousse server is a piii866, it's a bit short for what we want to do I think. I hope the next upgrade will improve Larousse, then we'll can move other wikis to it. And we'll see if Pliny is really the bottleneck.
>
> My 2 cents

I was suggesting making a read-only mirror by mirroring the database
rather than just the HTML. Every time a page is updated on the main DB
server, an update would automatically be sent to the mirror. It's a very
simple method, which meets Daniel's requirements of short latency. The
idea would be that the mirror would serve web pages by getting articles
from its local copy of the database, rather than from the other side of
the world or country or whatever.

We could even set up a full read-write server on the other side of the
world, and redirect users to a different domain name as they arrive,
based on their location. Users could specify their preferred mirror in
their user preferences. We could even make larousse the default for
logged-in users, that way most edits go to a web server which is close
to the master DB.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Mirroring (was Re: Fundraising)

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> We could even set up a full read-write server on the other side of the
> world, and redirect users to a different domain name as they arrive,
> based on their location. Users could specify their preferred mirror in
> their user preferences. We could even make larousse the default for
> logged-in users, that way most edits go to a web server which is close
> to the master DB.

Actually, it's not really mirroring then. What would you call it? A
distributed cluster?

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikimedia email addresses

body:
Tarquin wrote:
>is there any word on getting these set up?

I set-up maveric149 at wikimedia.org as an email forward to maveric149 at yahoo.com
for myself back when I had access to the interface to manage that domain. If
I still did then I would setup a email forward for you and any other
wikimedian that wanted one. It works fine, BTW.

>I just added my email to the
>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia%27s_first_press_release
>page, and it struck me that it would be convenient if press contacts
>there were of the form tarquin at wikimedia.org and so on.

I already suggested that Jimbo should use a wikimedia.org or better,
wikimediafoundation.org email address for the press release. An email forward
to his Bomis email address is all that would be needed.

I don't think having a full blown email service is in our mandate but it might
be a neat thing to give to people who donate more than a certain amount of
money per year.

@wikimediafoundation.org, however, should be reserved for current and former
officers/board members of the foundation, IMO.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
>He has recently threatened to turn over RK's name to
>various militant Islamic organizations on [[Talk:Militant Islam]].
>This threat is should be taken as seriously as any other death
>threats that have been posted on Wikipedia, and should cause
>immediate banning of the user under all variations.  RickK

Historical note: EntmootsOfTrolls as 142.177 gave me an implied death threat
before (along with some hideous slander that has since been nuked completely
from the database) and he, as user '24', threatened Larry Sanger with great
bodily harm. This seems to be a tactic of his in order to win arguments and
get his way by trying to scare his opponents.

The hard ban on 142.177 was never lifted, BTW. I and others simply got tired
of enforcing it. So RickK, if he is breaking our rules again, then by all
means enforce the hard ban by reverting all his edits from now on. I simply
don't have time anymore.

PS: EntmootsOfTrolls admitted on Jimbo's talk page to being 142.177 and the
case for 24 being 142.177 is in the 'beyond reasonable doubt' range. But
142.177 was hard banned for what he did at that IP range alone.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject:
[Wikitech-l] (Re: wikimedia email addresses) and WikiXX-l-admin
	adress

body:
tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote in
news:3F6F52B6.1040604 at planetunreal.com:

> is there any word on getting these set up?
>
> I just added my email to the
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia%27s_first_press_release
> page, and it struck me that it would be convenient if press contacts
> there were of the form tarquin at wikimedia.org
> and so on.

I have noticed that the dutch wikipedia does have recieved any questions
from visitors for some time.

The contact-adress for Wikipedia is wikiNL-l-admin at wikipedia.org

It is used for a contact form and the press-release and other externall
contacts. I have send some test emails and it does not seem to work
anymore.

The sender does not even get a error message, it is only gone.

Can this be fixed please? The messages to wikiNL-l-admin at wikipedia.org must
go to the admins of wikiNL-l (the sysops of wikipedia NL)

--
Contact: walter AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


body:
Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> I read the mysql book and they said we shouldnt use replication for Read and
> Write.
>
> We have to set up a master server, only one for writing, and slaves server
> for reading. We dont need to have a permanent connection between master and
> slaves, that's fun !

Sorry, I was kind of writing in my own special language again. You're
quite right CC, in fact that's basically what I meant.

My idea is to have multiple web servers, each with their slave database.
There will be one master database, presumably remaining on pliny for the
time being. When a web server needs to read the database, it reads its
own local copy. When it needs to write, it contacts pliny (whether pliny
is in the next rack or on the other side of the world), and sends its
updates. Pliny will send all updates to the slaves.

Larousse may also send some read queries to pliny, if pliny isn't too busy.

> But as far as I understood, we need to lock the master for each new slave,
> this could take time with Go of data we have....

We already do this for backup. We would just have to record where in the
binary log each backup occurs. Then we would copy the backup dump, set
up the database, inform the slave of where it's up to in the binary log,
and then start the replication.

Andre Engels wrote:
 >Would it not be better to keep the mirrors read-only, and have them
 >redirect to the master for write-access? To have writing in several
 >places causes significant overhead in avoiding edit conflicts and such.

I'm not too worried about edit conflicts, due to Brion's great new
detection method. It's the "and such" that has me slightly anxious --
i.e. stuff that we haven't thought of yet. At the moment, I don't know
of any particular overhead other than network lag.

It will be slower to write from a remote server, which is why I
suggested editors be redirected to larousse when they log in. About 90%
of editing activity is performed by logged in users.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Update.php considered harmful

body:
Please don't put alterations to the database structure into update.php. In
fact, please don't use update.php at all. I don't know why it exists, and
would advocate deleting it.

Database alterations should be in clean, separable text files containing
runnable, human-readable SQL statements. They should be called
"patch-XXX.sql" where XXX is a descriptive word. They should go in
maintenance/archives. patch-list.txt there should include a description of
the problem it solves and instructions on what it's all about.

If update.php is to be saved, it needs to be rewritten to not make a mess
of things and use only these clean, legible, standalone files.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
> If update.php is to be saved, it needs to be rewritten to not make a mess
> of things and use only these clean, legible, standalone files.

Further, it needs to be aware that many wikis may be running from the
same codebase, and that they all need to be updated simultaneously.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikimedia email addresses

body:
is there any word on getting these set up?

I just added my email to the
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia%27s_first_press_release
page, and it struck me that it would be convenient if press contacts
there were of the form tarquin at wikimedia.org and so on.


subject: [Wikitech-l] wikimedia email addresses


body:
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> The sender does not even get a error message, it is only gone.
>
> Can this be fixed please? The messages to wikiNL-l-admin@ wikipedia.org must
> go to the admins of wikiNL-l (the sysops of wikipedia NL)

I tried sending to that address. It was received, and piped to mailman,
but nothing was sent out, and I can't find anything in mailman's logs.

I tried sending to textbook-l-admin, which would include me, but instead
of sending direct it sent a message saying it had received a bounce --
actually my message -- and forwarded it to... textbook-l-admin, me and
mav. :P

Beats me. I'll bang at it later if no one else knows where to look.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Stats

body:
Brion wrote:
> Erik zachte asked me to hold off on running them until he had it
ready.
> I hope they didn't get lost by my spam filters. :)

I did send the updates Saturday, but the mail must have bounced:
Brions mailbox was full (can of mail worms)

Mail finally reached Brion, so I hope new stats will arrive soon now.

Additions:
- word count (Erik Moeller, no worries, one letter words are included),
- page size distribution and
- integration of webalizer monthly usage stats (mostly for easy
interwiki comparison on pages requests and visits). Appetizer: Japanese
Wikipedia reaches third place at both indicators, not too far behind
German wikipedia. Tomos told me one of the three major newspapers wrote
about ja: recently.

Erik Zachte


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikimedia email addresses

body:
On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 19:13, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tarquin wrote:
> >is there any word on getting these set up?
>
> I set-up maveric149 at wikimedia.org as an email forward to maveric149 at yahoo.com
> for myself back when I had access to the interface to manage that domain. If
> I still did then I would setup a email forward for you and any other
> wikimedian that wanted one. It works fine, BTW.

(Well, it probably doesn't work anymore, since mail @wikimedia.org
should now be going via pliny instead of the registrar's generic
servers.)

It's trivial to set up a few forwarding aliases, but the implication is
that someone with a @wikimedia.org address is more specialer than the
rest 'o' the folks.

My preference would be to have role-based aliases instead: contact-en,
contacte-fr, kontakto-eo etc @wikimedia.org.

But, that's just me.

> I already suggested that Jimbo should use a wikimedia.org or better,
> wikimediafoundation.org email address for the press release. An email forward
> to his Bomis email address is all that would be needed.

Hmm, I'll see if I can get wikimediafoundation.org pointing at the right
place.

> @wikimediafoundation.org, however, should be reserved for current and former
> officers/board members of the foundation, IMO.

So... how _are_ those officers and board coming along? I don't know much
about Florida law, but I assume someone has to adopt some bylaws
eventually.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageDe.php V1.31

body:
Hello,

new version (1.31) of LanguageDe.php in CVS.

Smurf

PS: If someone can apply the fix mentioned in
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/006106.html
we could be back in Multi-Lingual-Mode for the Watchlist ;)
--
Smurf

smurf at AdamAnt.mud.de
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Islamism - no parallel encyclopedia within

body:
From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
Anthere writes:
> can't help but take with a grain of salt the issue
> you raise above, with the fact you listed
> [[Militant Islam]] for deletion just after RK
redirected
> it with justifications which were not convincing.

That's nonsense. The reasons stated were not only
convincing, they always have been STANDARD WIKIPEDIA
POLICY.

It is a clear violation of Wikipedia NPOV and naming
policy to make an exact copy of an article we already
have, retitle it, and then edit it to push your own
political and religious views.  People may not create
their own private encyclopedias within Wikipedia which
bypass our normal peer review process.

If someone doesn't like the article on [[Flowers]], or
on [[History]] or on [[Islamism]], they are welcome to
work with others in editing it and improving it. But
they may not copy this article, and make their own POV
version of it, and set up their private enyclopedia
within Wikipedia.

This is hardly "not convincing".  This is the standard
Wikipedia policy that all of us have always followed
from the beginning. If people like EntmootsOfTrolls
find themselves unable to follow our NPOV policy, and
unable to work with others in reaching a consensus,
then they should stay away from those articles
altogether.

Robert (RK)

--------

When one is censored so much and so deliberatly, it is
not entirely surprising that they try to use other
means to have other opinions that the current trend
inserted in that encyclopedia.

As a reminder, this encyclopedia means to neutral, and
in I am correct, neutral means to welcome all points
of view on a topic. I do not necessarily mean every
little opinion, but every opinion that might be
relevant.

To achieve that, it is a *good* idea that people of
various points of view collaborate on these articles,
and if necessary on talk pages.

Collaboration : collaborate means "exchanging" point
of view, trying to  reach an agreement on what should
be included in the article. This usually implies
answering something else than "no" in talk page. Or
even answering at all btw. I tried to talk to you on
[[talk:islamism]], and all I got from you was "no" and
a very very very very very deep silence.

Relevant : I agreed some of the stuff inserted was
biaised. I proposed to you to rework it. The current
article is not informative enough. The proposed
insertion, though biased is informative. Hence my
desire for it to be inserted, after npoving. All I got
from you was "no" and a very very very very very deep
silence.

Points of view : moving in a difficult and dangerous
realm here. What are we talking about ? Islamism. Very
hot topic. One that would deserve a specific type of
loving care. One that we would suppose would interest
a good number of people here. All the ones that have
suffered a loss in 9/11. All the americans probably.
All the french as well (for mind you, terrorism and
violence DID NOT start 2 years ago). All muslim people
on wikipedia (not many it appears). And all those
interested by religion.

In the end, who is working on Islamism ?
You, Graft
Steve who was in an edit war with you previously on
that topic
Who is currently reverting these articles ?
RickK
Who is trying to give hir opinion, and is either
reverted or just not listen to
142 and I.

In the end, the only ones that have access to these
articles are you and Graft. Others are carefully left
aside. 142 will soon be permanently shut up. And you
will discourage me to try to work on this one, where
my opinion is just good at being left unanswered on
talk pages.

I do not support the current islamism article. It is
non-informative enough, and non neutral, and as such
is not respecting wikipedia rules. At least, it is not
respecting french point of view.

Hence, I started a [[Islam in France]], where I will
try to put the french point of view at least. Islamism
should not be written by american only, and not by
appently people of jewish culture/religion only as
well. Catholics pov, muslim pov, bouddhists pov should
be welcome as well. If you feel that it is a breach of
wikipedia protocole to do so, please remember that
France has a long history of contact with muslim
people, hate and love with Algeria story, major bounds
with this country that are not gonna be broken any
time soon, that about 10% of French population is from
Muslim extraction, that we live fondamentalism and/or
islamism on our soil, not just by tv shows, that we
are still struggling for integration of all these
people, and that already now, the mixing of muslim and
mostly catholics culture is producing great things.
Our growth pains are from a different perspective than
your fights against integrists. And they also deserve
attention.

I am quite disapointed, that no one cares about such a
topic, and accept that censorship is being so hard on
it. If only, because it would be enlightful to
understand other points of view that the one one can
read in books and newspapers. If only because american
people deserve more than what is currently proposed on
the islamism article.

I am not knowledgeable really on that topic. So, my
main proposition for Wikipedia sake is that I focus my
next week end promotion of Wikipedia in north african
countries, where a lot of the population is
french-speaking (as well as english) and muslim.

This was an interesting week RK. I am ****really****
glad that you stayed polite. I would have appreciated
that you accepted to work with me as well. Sorry that
we were not able to even work on talk page together.

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


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 work on Cold War

body:
Having observed a strict indifference to 172 edits for a long time, trying
to avoid an edit war. I believe it will be possible to work with him on some
subject.
I still think that 172 is very POViewed. It's not a problem in itself but
172 is still systematically reverting edits on his work.
It seems to be still very hard. I'm an amateur while 172 is a professionnal,
he's a native English speaker and my skills in English. OK but I still think
that it's not acceptable to write that the Khmer Rouge were US-backed for
instance, even if the US administration did not actively oppose them.
I invite everyone to have a look a the Cold War article.

Ericd


subject: [WikiEN-l] 143.93.17.21 spam

body:
User 143.93.17.21 is adding a reference to summer seminars at the European
Graduate School in many articles (mainly related to film director).
I think this is mainly advertising and I have reverted some. What's your
advice.

Ericd


subject: [WikiEN-l] 143.93.17.21 spam

body:
 User 143.93.17.21 is adding a reference to summer seminars at the European
Graduate School in many articles (mainly related to film director).
I think this is mainly advertising and I have reverted some. What's your
advice.

 Ericd


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Update.php considered harmful

body:
On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Tim Starling wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Please don't put alterations to the database structure into update.php. In
> > fact, please don't use update.php at all. I don't know why it exists, and
> > would advocate deleting it.
>
> It was Lee's idea.

I know, I still don't like it. :)

> Okay, fine by me. My MediaWiki namespace code needs a PHP script not
> just SQL, should I name it similarly?

Sure.

> If you're not going to use update.php, could you please use some other
> method of making sure you mark files group writeable? Perhaps a umask
> command in your login script?

I *have* a 'umask 002' command in my login script. Better ideas (for
working with files in general, not just updating the php scripts) are
welcome if you've got them.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Replication and whatnot thought

body:
Something that just popped into my mind... separating history. IE, once
we're in multiple-server land, have:
A) Read-write server(s)- sent to when you click an edit link
B) Read-only servers for primary viewing - no old versions of articles
stored (or just a couple recent ones)
C) Read-only server(s) with history - sent to when you click page history
(or a diff link somewhere)

B being the new bit that came to mind, thinking about the tendency of
database performance to degrade based on size.

Just a random thought.
-- Jake


subject: [WikiEN-l] Curious...

body:
Did anyone even get my message about Kurt Kawohl and such? I don't want to
look like I expect everyone to react significantly to everything I say, but
I'm rather surprised at there being absolutely no responses. Ban talk
usually prods several people into talking.

-- Jake


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Curious...

body:
>Did anyone even get my message about Kurt Kawohl and such? I don't want to
>look like I expect everyone to react significantly to everything I say, but
>I'm rather surprised at there being absolutely no responses. Ban talk
>usually prods several people into talking.

Used to.

If there is a serious problem best to contact Jimbo directly with evidence
in hand.

Fred


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ban of EntmootsOfTrolls

body:
I agree with Rick.  It's unfortunately time for a hard ban of EofT.
This sort of behavior is entirely unacceptable.  I have probably made
a big mistake in trying to avoid rebanning him.

This time, what I plan to do is pursue this one aggressively with any
and all ISPs that he tries to use to get around the ban.  Who knows
how well that will work, but one of the big issues with EofT is that
he has explicitly said that he intends to violate any ban that I
impose.

Rick wrote:
> He has recently threatened to turn over RK's name to various
>militant Islamic organizations on [[Talk:Militant Islam]].  This
>threat is should be taken as seriously as any other death threats that
>have been posted on Wikipedia, and should cause immediate banning of
>the user under all variations.  RickK


subject: [Wikitech-l] *.wikipedia.com

body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 05:40, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> I have noticed that fy.wikipedia.com and af.wikipedia.com point to a
> strange website.

Is now forwarding to the proper locations.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Curious...

body:
Hm. Fair enough. On later reflection, I've realized that with all of Kurt
Kawohl's stuff scheduled to be deleted in a couple days, and those
blanking-attacks being as small as they were, he's probably not worth
banning. Request retracted... though I won't complain one bit if he is
banned at some point.
Quoth bio bit in a message he spammed the bug-glibc list with: "a Author/
Financial Advisor/ Real Estate Broker." / Con Artist, by my reckoning...

-- Jake


subject: [Wikitech-l] *.wikipedia.com

body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 08:23, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 05:40, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> > I have noticed that fy.wikipedia.com and af.wikipedia.com point to a
> > strange website.
>
> Is now forwarding to the proper locations.

(At least, it should be. Updates to the DNS may not have finished
propagating to every corner of the globe.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Curious...

body:
At 05:19 AM 9/23/03 -0500, Jake wrote:
>Did anyone even get my message about Kurt Kawohl and such? I don't want to
>look like I expect everyone to react significantly to everything I say, but
>I'm rather surprised at there being absolutely no responses. Ban talk
>usually prods several people into talking.

My feeling is that I can keep an eye on Transcendentalism indefinitely, and
that banning is, and should be, reserved for limited, serious cases.

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


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
> When one is censored so much and so deliberatly, it
> is
> not entirely surprising that they try to use other
> means to have other opinions that the current trend
> inserted in that encyclopedia.
>
> As a reminder, this encyclopedia means to neutral,
> and
> in I am correct, neutral means to welcome all points
> of view on a topic. I do not necessarily mean every
> little opinion, but every opinion that might be
> relevant.
>
> To achieve that, it is a *good* idea that people of
> various points of view collaborate on these
> articles,
> and if necessary on talk pages.
>
> Collaboration : collaborate means "exchanging" point
> of view, trying to  reach an agreement on what
> should
> be included in the article. This usually implies
> answering something else than "no" in talk page. Or
> even answering at all btw. I tried to talk to you on
> [[talk:islamism]], and all I got from you was "no"
> and
> a very very very very very deep silence.
>
> Relevant : I agreed some of the stuff inserted was
> biaised. I proposed to you to rework it. The current
> article is not informative enough. The proposed
> insertion, though biased is informative. Hence my
> desire for it to be inserted, after npoving. All I
> got
> from you was "no" and a very very very very very
> deep
> silence.
>
> Points of view : moving in a difficult and dangerous
> realm here. What are we talking about ? Islamism.
> Very
> hot topic. One that would deserve a specific type of
> loving care. One that we would suppose would
> interest
> a good number of people here. All the ones that have
> suffered a loss in 9/11. All the americans probably.
> All the french as well (for mind you, terrorism and
> violence DID NOT start 2 years ago). All muslim
> people
> on wikipedia (not many it appears). And all those
> interested by religion.
>
> In the end, who is working on Islamism ?
> You, Graft
> Steve who was in an edit war with you previously on
> that topic
> Who is currently reverting these articles ?
> RickK
> Who is trying to give hir opinion, and is either
> reverted or just not listen to
> 142 and I.
>
> In the end, the only ones that have access to these
> articles are you and Graft. Others are carefully
> left
> aside. 142 will soon be permanently shut up. And you
> will discourage me to try to work on this one, where
> my opinion is just good at being left unanswered on
> talk pages.
>
> I do not support the current islamism article. It is
> non-informative enough, and non neutral, and as such
> is not respecting wikipedia rules. At least, it is
> not
> respecting french point of view.
>
> Hence, I started a [[Islam in France]], where I will
> try to put the french point of view at least.
> Islamism
> should not be written by american only, and not by
> appently people of jewish culture/religion only as
> well. Catholics pov, muslim pov, bouddhists pov
> should
> be welcome as well. If you feel that it is a breach
> of
> wikipedia protocole to do so, please remember that
> France has a long history of contact with muslim
> people, hate and love with Algeria story, major
> bounds
> with this country that are not gonna be broken any
> time soon, that about 10% of French population is
> from
> Muslim extraction, that we live fondamentalism
> and/or
> islamism on our soil, not just by tv shows, that we
> are still struggling for integration of all these
> people, and that already now, the mixing of muslim
> and
> mostly catholics culture is producing great things.
> Our growth pains are from a different perspective
> than
> your fights against integrists. And they also
> deserve
> attention.
>
> I am quite disapointed, that no one cares about such
> a
> topic, and accept that censorship is being so hard
> on
> it. If only, because it would be enlightful to
> understand other points of view that the one one can
> read in books and newspapers. If only because
> american
> people deserve more than what is currently proposed
> on
> the islamism article.
>
> I am not knowledgeable really on that topic. So, my
> main proposition for Wikipedia sake is that I focus
> my
> next week end promotion of Wikipedia in north
> african
> countries, where a lot of the population is
> french-speaking (as well as english) and muslim.
>
> This was an interesting week RK. I am ****really****
> glad that you stayed polite. I would have
> appreciated
> that you accepted to work with me as well. Sorry
> that
> we were not able to even work on talk page together.

You're making a seperate page for one specific POV?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
> Your argument, sir, makes as much sense as mine. The
> need for Wikipedia
> seeding is highly debatable; and the advisability of
> doing it even more
> debatable, as the more that bots are used, the less
> likely it is that
> someone will go back and look at all those bot
> entries.
>
> There should be a balance between encyclopedia size
> and contributor
> participation--the best way to ensure that is to not
> auto-generate
> entries.
>
> My suggestion was to let bot-seeding happen, but for
> those seeds to
> remain "hidden" until someone goes and looks for the
> information. Take,
> for example, [[Leominster, Massachusetts]].
>
> My proposal would be as follows:
> 1. If you went to [[Johnny Appleseed]], for example,
> the link to
> Leominster would be in new-page or stub-link format
> (? or !), not a
> standard link, until someone actually made a change
> other than the
> Rambot entry.
> 2. If you click to that link, you see the Rambot
> content.
> 3. If you search for Leominster, the Rambot entry
> would show up in the
> listing (perhaps tagged).
> 4. The page wouldn't count in the statistics until
> someone's made at
> least one edit to the entry.
>
> That way you get the benefit of the content-seeding
> without the
> distortion of the size or intent of Wikipedia, even
> if hundreds of
> thousands of such seedings are done.
>
> There's also the side argument that all Rambot did
> was take information
> that should be in tables and graphs and put it into
> paragraph form to
> make it seem like Wikipedia style. It probably sould
> have done better
> just to supply the tables and graphs for eventual
> inclusion in real
> entries about the towns.

Sounds like a good idea, but I think that should be
for all articles that have only been edited by one
person. We shouldn't single out rambot.

The other thing ist that this (your idea or my
variant, either one) would make the article count jump
down by at least 25,000. This is very significant.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Finishing up (loose ends)

body:
--- Steve Vertigum <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>
> > Stevertigo would like for you to say "These are
> > politicized numbers
> > from the murderous apartheid Jews".  But that
> isn't
> > NPOV.  :-)
>
> Although I understand Jimbo's desire to caste me as
> Troll, I cant accept this-- and am disappointed in
> Jimbos hastly, inappropriate, and slanted
> characterization.  You must not have read my
> comments
> well enough, Senor Wales.

Well, what ''do'' you want written there, then?
>
> > Others might argue, though, and legitimately, that
> > the exact wording
> > that you do choose should not inappropriately
> > legitimize or validate
> > the statistics beyond a level that would be
> > uncontroversially accepted
> > by reasonable partisans.
>
> This is reasonable -- again, my last word on this
> (only in response to the slander) was that there be
> too many articles to edit by hand. Several hundred
> is
> not such a number.
>
> ~S~

Why must they be edited by hand? What editing are you
talking about, exactly?
LDan

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subject: [Wikitech-L] redirecting search to google broken

body:
> From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net>

> I tried some search on Japanese Wikipedia, which was of course off,
> and I was redirected to the Google. But the problem was - the request URL
> didn't contain encoding information.

Does now. :)

Thanks for the note...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Walter Vermeir wrote:

> I have noticed that the dutch wikipedia does have recieved any questions
> from visitors for some time.
>
> The contact-adress for Wikipedia is wikiNL-l-admin at wikipedia.org
>
> It is used for a contact form and the press-release and other externall
> contacts. I have send some test emails and it does not seem to work
> anymore.
>
> The sender does not even get a error message, it is only gone.
>
> Can this be fixed please? The messages to wikiNL-l-admin at wikipedia.org must
> go to the admins of wikiNL-l (the sysops of wikipedia NL)

I think the fix should be considered quite important, because
wikinl-l-admin at wikipedia.org is also given as the contact address for the
Dutch language version of the press release.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Servers

body:
Geoffrey Thomas wrote:

>tarquin <tarquin*planetunreal?com> writes:
>
>
>>But please stop posting irrelevant stuff to this list. As you may have
>>noticed it is starting to annoy some people.
>>
>>
>
>[[MeatBall:AssumeGoodFaith]]. I had asked in an earler e-mail if the text
>can be added to [[WikiPedia:Servers]] - the article seemed a bit lacking
>and his e-mail seemed a good starting point for non-technical people to
>understand exactly what Wikimedia is buying.
>
>[[User:Geoffrey]] Thomas
>
>
I asked the MB collective about this sort of problem, and the conclusion
was:

"The first time they ask a stupid question, you point them to the FAQ.
The next time they ask a stupid question, you ask if they have read the
FAQ. The third time, they have demonstrated that they are irresponsible
and therefore they aren't worth your time."


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Please don't put alterations to the database structure into update.php. In
> fact, please don't use update.php at all. I don't know why it exists, and
> would advocate deleting it.

It was Lee's idea.

> Database alterations should be in clean, separable text files containing
> runnable, human-readable SQL statements. They should be called
> "patch-XXX.sql" where XXX is a descriptive word. They should go in
> maintenance/archives. patch-list.txt there should include a description of
> the problem it solves and instructions on what it's all about.

Okay, fine by me. My MediaWiki namespace code needs a PHP script not
just SQL, should I name it similarly?

If you're not going to use update.php, could you please use some other
method of making sure you mark files group writeable? Perhaps a umask
command in your login script?

-- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Alternate access for English wikipedia

body:
To access the English wikipedia through pliny (the bigger server), which
may be faster while Larousse is overloaded:
http://en2.wikipedia.org/

It's read/write for articles, but it's got a slightly outdated copy of
the uploaded images, and I've disabled new uploads. New TeX images may
stomp on each other too, but that can be sorted out later.

Please don't stomp on it too hard; that's the server with the database
and all the other languages, too!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
> > What does the acronym GFDL stand for?
>
> Why don't you just try to look things up in the Wikipedia before you
> post more stupid newbie questions on this list?  Perhaps you think
> this list is about you?
>
> Are you only stupid, or really a troll?

Now, Lars, let's be nice.  I understand why you ask the question, mind
you.  I find Merritt to be rather amazing myself.

Merritt, please, you should not ask simple questions like this on the
list without taking the time to look up the answers yourself first.
If you have a question *about* the GFDL or fair use, after you've read
the relevant articles, that will of course be welcomed.

But this list has too much traffic as it is for us to have lots of
discussion of basic points.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Performance hacks

body:
I've temporarily disabled talk page notification for IP addresses that
aren't logged in, as this dumps an extra database query for every single
hit.

If it doesn't make a big difference, it'll get turned back on shortly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use (Alex, Brion et Tarquin)

in_reply_to:
<1063651598.5880.14.camel@frank.vibber.org>;
	from brion@pobox.com on Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 11:46:39AM -0700

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better than a picture we can't
> redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own hands or scan it from
> a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't have a "public domain"
> or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it, think twice.

I agree completely with this sentiment.  I think we should not be
pushing any boundaries with respect to fair use, because of the
redistribution issue.

As Alex has been patiently teaching us, fair use is a defense, a
defense that depends on the use, and for that reason, and because of
our interest in free redistribution, we should take care that when we
do rely on fair use, we do so in such a way that almost anyone could
rely on a fair use defense for any plausible re-use of our content.

To take the easiest possible example, a quote of a few sentences of a
copyrighted novel in an article about the author of that novel.  This
is fair use for us, and it's also going to be fair use for just about
any plausible re-use of our content.

> It was disabled on the English wikipedia, as that's where abuses were
> occuring (quite frequently). In any case I would _discourage_ such
> linking. And there have been enough crazy court decisions over 'deep
> linking' and such that I wouldn't rely on "it's just a link to another
> site, we're not _copying it_" for an image embedded into a web page.
> (IANAL)

Yes, and it's pretty rude to the other webmaster.  People often refer
to it as 'stealing bandwidth', which may be an overly bold claim, but
still, it's not good etiquette to embed an image in that way.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] *.wikipedia.com

body:
I have noticed that fy.wikipedia.com and af.wikipedia.com point to a
strange website.

Best check all ex-.com wikipedias there forward and send all other other
*.wikipedia.com to
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_provisional_portal_of_Wikipedia

--
Contact: walter AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 15:04, Imran Ghory wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better than a picture we can't
> > redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own hands or scan it from
> > a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't have a "public domain"
> > or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it, think twice.
>
> I'd just like to point out that US law is *pre-1923* not 1924.

Sorry for the inexactitude.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikimedia email addresses

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>It's trivial to set up a few forwarding aliases, but the implication is
>that someone with a @wikimedia.org address is more specialer than the
>rest 'o' the folks.
>
>My preference would be to have role-based aliases instead: contact-en,
>contacte-fr, kontakto-eo etc @wikimedia.org.
>
>
That is a better idea.
(but it would be "contact-fr")

can we set these up in time?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Performance hacks

body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 17:10, Tim Starling wrote:
> May I suggest also reducing the number of update queries to sitestats?

The total page view count is a pretty pointless statistic, and it also
fails to count cached pages. We can get better information from the web
server logs.

I'm just going to turn that off. (Left off at 63,197,425 current article
page views since July 2002 -- minus any cached page views since May. Not
bad!)

The _edit_ counter and _article_ counter will continue to update.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] redirecting search to google broken

body:
I tried some search on Japanese Wikipedia, which was of course off,
and I was redirected to the Google. But the problem was - the request URL
didn't contain encoding information.

&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 should be added to the request URL.


from_name: Schneelocke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Performance hacks

body:
Hi Brion Vibber,

> I've temporarily disabled talk page notification for IP addresses that
> aren't logged in, as this dumps an extra database query for every single
> hit.
>
> If it doesn't make a big difference, it'll get turned back on shortly.

It does seem to make a noticeable positive difference.

--
 9:04PM  up 34 days,  5:26, 2 users, load averages: 0.16, 0.20, 0.17

Every non-empty totally disconnected perfect compact metric space is
homeomorphic to the Cantor set.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy-
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better than a picture we can't
>> redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own hands or scan it from
>> a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't have a "public domain"
>> or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it, think twice.

> I agree completely with this sentiment.  I think we should not be
> pushing any boundaries with respect to fair use, because of the
> redistribution issue.

The image use policy is fairly clear on which fair use is allowed and
generally discourages it. Bringing the fair use issue up again and again
on the mailing list and writing long winded messages why we shouldn't do
it only will generate fear, uncertainty and doubt about fair use in
general, and potentially triggers unproductive flamewars.

As a strong proponent of fair use rights, and as a believer in the
necessity of fair use on Wikipedia in certain cases (you won't get Don
Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein to pose for another handshake), I do not think
this is the right approach. Instead, we should correct mistakes where they
occur and educate users about the limits.

The next time someone brings up fair use, please just point them to the
relevant pages on Wikipedia. These are [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], [[fair
use]], [[copyright]], [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]].

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use and inline links

body:
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fair use (Alex, Brion et
> Tarquin)
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better
> than a picture we can't
> > redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own
> hands or scan it from
> > a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't
> have a "public domain"
> > or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it,
> think twice.
>
> I agree completely with this sentiment.  I think we
> should not be
> pushing any boundaries with respect to fair use,
> because of the
> redistribution issue.
>
> As Alex has been patiently teaching us, fair use is
> a defense, a
> defense that depends on the use, and for that
> reason, and because of
> our interest in free redistribution, we should take
> care that when we
> do rely on fair use, we do so in such a way that
> almost anyone could
> rely on a fair use defense for any plausible re-use
> of our content.
>
> To take the easiest possible example, a quote of a
> few sentences of a
> copyrighted novel in an article about the author of
> that novel.  This
> is fair use for us, and it's also going to be fair
> use for just about
> any plausible re-use of our content.

Thanks for revoicing this again Jimbo. That is a point
that was raised again a couple of days ago on the fr
wiki (I mean...what your position was on the topic,
and the level of risk wikimedia was ready to accept)

> > It was disabled on the English wikipedia, as
> that's where abuses were
> > occuring (quite frequently). In any case I would
> _discourage_ such
> > linking. And there have been enough crazy court
> decisions over 'deep
> > linking' and such that I wouldn't rely on "it's
> just a link to another
> > site, we're not _copying it_" for an image
> embedded into a web page.
> > (IANAL)
>
> Yes, and it's pretty rude to the other webmaster.
> People often refer
> to it as 'stealing bandwidth', which may be an
> overly bold claim, but
> still, it's not good etiquette to embed an image in
> that way.

Loo run a query to list all the inline links. There
were quite a bunch. There were also a certain nomber
of inline links made from the other wikipedia sites,
especially meta.

This is probably due to the fact it is a bit painful
to "tranfer" a pict from one wikipedia to another, and
for some resources (such as flags) it make sense to
have a common source of images, not to copy and copy
again from the others wikipedias.

I would like to support making impossible to make some
inline links on all wikipedias; not english only.

I understood the en took that decision because of
goatce.However, as you say, it is not nice for the
webmaster and the other web site. Besides, the link
may die. Plus, the reader does not know whether he may
benefit the ressource. He might come to believe he can
just copy the image, and that one be GFDL. It is
misleading and dangerous to other one.

Finally, Alex and
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corporation
indicated that it was not necessarily a good idea to
use this type of linkage.

Anthere

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from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It hasn't stopped. EntmootsOfTrolls is still harassing me.
> A few days ago his comments libeled me as a criminal,
> explicitly charging me with "criminal behavior".
>
> Now he is trying to "out" me, by publicly using what he
> believes to be my real name. (He is almost correct...yet
> wrong. That's one of the problems when you out people. You
> direct atatckers to the wrong victim.)

Call the FBI. That's what we pay them to do. Tell them that death
threats were made against you in a public forum.

Surprisingly, they are very efficient at tracing people, especially
if it's related to terrorism.

Now, if you feel your life is threatened, I would personally "get out
of dodge", figuratively, or not.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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from_name: Imran Ghory

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better than a picture we can't
> redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own hands or scan it from
> a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't have a "public domain"
> or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it, think twice.

I'd just like to point out that US law is *pre-1923* not 1924.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [WikiEN-l] Finishing up (loose ends)

body:
--- Steve Vertigum <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>
> > Stevertigo would like for you to say "These are
> > politicized numbers
> > from the murderous apartheid Jews".  But that isn't
> > NPOV.  :-)
>
> Although I understand Jimbo's desire to caste me as
> Troll, I cant accept this-- and am disappointed in
> Jimbos hastly, inappropriate, and slanted
> characterization.  You must not have read my comments
> well enough, Senor Wales.

Steve,

It is my experience that Jimbo is quite careful at reading comments.
I would simply suggest that you might exercise more diligence in
drafting your comments, so as to avoid them being understood in a
manner which you did not intend.

Thanks in advance.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] I want a bot too

body:
--- John <Flockmeal at cox.net> wrote:
> There are certain things simply taken
> as
> facts that should be included in the Wikipedia. To wait for someone
> to
> enter all these things by hand would take forever. A bot can enter
> the
> data much more quickly and with a constantly consistent format for
> easy
> reading. Sure, someone should go back and look at all these bot
> entrys
> to add more information they might have from personal experience
> but to
> not let bots seed the 'pedia with factual stubs first would lessen
> Wikipedia's content.

I agree that bots can serve a good purpose.

However, the problem I see is that they can insert a lot of trivial
information into the W. (For example, who needs the *exact* number of
residents in any particular town?)

I think bots can be used to do busywork (for this is why compter
programs (and computers) were created in the first place)) but that
they must mark their passage and make it easy to re-bot the info. For
example, they might segregate the botted info like <bot id="120">
some data in xhml or xml</bot>

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: John Robinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Banning User:BuddhaInside

body:
Now that account banning is installed on en: I plan to avail of it.
User:BuddhaInside has been trolling the 'pedia for over two weeks now,
with no end in sight.  His contributions list is an almost endless
series of revert wars; a record of some objections to his actions can
be found at [[Wikipedia:Problem_users/BuddhaInside]] and at the
following user talk pages which he has attempted to hide from view:
User page
[[User_talk:BuddhaInside/Delete6633]]

User talk page
[[User_talk:BuddhaInside/Delete3091]]
[[User_talk:BuddhaInside/Delete5253]]
[[User_talk:BuddhaInside/Delete0655]]
[[User_talk:BuddhaInside/Delete4368]]

 From his/her actions, it's clear this is someone who has used the
system extensively before the account was made, either someone wanting
a "Hyde"-type personality to cause trouble for fun, or a previously
banned user.

I don't take using an account ban lightly, so this is your chance to
either talk me out of it or yank my admin privileges beforehand.  I
intend to ban this account after another day or so.

-Hephaestos


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising

body:
Could somebody with access to the wikimediafoundation.org domain copy
http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html onto that website and
have it display for users when they click on
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising ?

I'll try to put together a bare basic homepage for the foundation before I
leave for my four day Yosemite/Mammoth area trip on Thursday.

Both of these things are needed in order to start distributing the press
release on Monday.

Of course, I will stop the presses if our upgrades won't be online by that
time. When is that going to get done?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Alex R.

body:
"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> said:

>...  we should take care that when we
> do rely on fair use, we do so in such a way that almost anyone could
> rely on a fair use defense for any plausible re-use of our content.
>
> To take the easiest possible example, a quote of a few sentences of a
> copyrighted novel in an article about the author of that novel.  This
> is fair use for us, and it's also going to be fair use for just about
> any plausible re-use of our content.

Very well said and a good example.

Alex756


body:
> Call the FBI. That's what we pay them to do. Tell them that death
> threats were made against you in a public forum.
>
> Surprisingly, they are very efficient at tracing people, especially
> if it's related to terrorism.
>
> Now, if you feel your life is threatened, I would personally "get out
> of dodge", figuratively, or not.
>
>
>
> =====
> Christopher Mahan
> chris_mahan at yahoo.com
> 818.943.1850 cell
> http://www.christophermahan.com/

Sound advice. This -is- illegal behavior, and the FBI would be interested.
Last I knew, we knew EoT's IP. With that, there's really no 'tracing'
necessary: it's basically one phone call for them. I'd direct them to a page
(preferably one the address of which can be said over the phone without too
much trouble...) where all his threats against people are listed... most
especially those that involve militant Islamic groups, as that'll especially
get their attention.

--Jake


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] New RAM troubles

body:
The new CPUs are still waiting to be shipped, but the RAM upgrade (4gig)
for pliny is in, and Jason took down the server for a bit to get it
installed.

Unfortunately, whether the problem is software or hardware, it didn't
work. :(  With the new memory in, mysqld would crash instead of
running... Attached log output from the last try.

The old memory (2gig) is back for now.

We don't currently have another machine which can hold the ram to sit
and run a memory tester program, and more downtime isn't really
acceptable just now.

The kernel (2.4.20) is configured with CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G and
CONFIG_HIGHMEM, and everything's lovely at 2 gig.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------

030924 08:05:08  mysqld started
030924  8:05:09  InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally.
InnoDB: Starting recovery from log files...
InnoDB: Starting log scan based on checkpoint at
InnoDB: log sequence number 13 1700811975
InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 13 1700811975
mysqld got signal 11;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose
the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong
and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=402653184
read_buffer_size=4190208
sort_buffer_size=1919252082
max_used_connections=0
max_connections=650
threads_connected=0
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_connections = 785799 K
bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

thd=0x8448fe8
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...

It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_connections = 785799 K
bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

thd=0x8448fe8
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...
Cannot determine thread, fp=0xbfffe4b8, backtrace may not be correct.
Stack range sanity check OK, backtrace follows:
0x80720ba
0x828fd7e
0x81d1c5e
0x81c7838
0x81c26fc
0x81d7e6a
0x8100eb2
0x80cd0a4
0x80c7d30
0x8072f47
0x82a23b2
0x8048101
New value of fp=(nil) failed sanity check, terminating stack trace!
Please read http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Using_stack_trace.html and follow instructions on how to resolve the stack trace. Resolved
stack trace is much more helpful in diagnosing the problem, so please do
resolve it
Trying to get some variables.
Some pointers may be invalid and cause the dump to abort...
thd->query at (nil)  is invalid pointer
thd->thread_id=842100835

Successfully dumped variables, if you ran with --log, take a look at the
details of what thread 842100835 did to cause the crash.  In some cases of really
bad corruption, the values shown above may be invalid.

The manual page at http://www.mysql.com/doc/C/r/Crashing.html containsjinformation thad`should help you find out what is causing the crash.
030924 08:05:09  mysqld ended


body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 23:21, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Could somebody with access to the wikimediafoundation.org domain copy
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html onto that website and
> have it display for users when they click on
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising ?

Done.

> Of course, I will stop the presses if our upgrades won't be online by that
> time. When is that going to get done?

Jason has just installed a RAM upgrade on pliny, but this caused
mysterious crashes so we've put the old RAM back until it can be tested
more thoroughly.

As for the CPU upgrades for larousse, Jimmy tells me there's some delay
with the shipping of parts, so we're looking at "early next week". :(

The server that had held the old Wikipedias and Nupedia and some other
stuff is back online, and we may be able to set it up temporarily as
another Wikipedia front-end web server to help with the load.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Brion wrote:
>> Could somebody with access to the wikimediafoundation.org
>>domain copy http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html
>>onto that website and have it display for users when they click on
>> http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising ?
>
>Done.

Sweet! Thanks Brion.

>Jason has just installed a RAM upgrade on pliny, but
>this caused mysterious crashes so we've put the old RAM
>back until it can be tested more thoroughly.

Too bad.  :-(

>As for the CPU upgrades for larousse, Jimmy tells me
>there's some delay with the shipping of parts, so we're
>looking at "early next week". :(

More bad news. :-(

>The server that had held the old Wikipedias and Nupedia
>and some other stuff is back online, and we may be able
>to set it up temporarily as another Wikipedia front-end web
>server to help with the load.

Hm. If that is the case, then can the non-English Wikipedias start to
distribute their versions of the press release on Monday, or should we just
put everything on hold for a week to give everybody some breathing room?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Performance hacks

body:
Brion-
> I've temporarily disabled talk page notification for IP addresses that
> aren't logged in, as this dumps an extra database query for every single
> hit.

> If it doesn't make a big difference, it'll get turned back on shortly.

Hmz, how do we measure "big difference"? Wikipedia has been everything
from "dog slow" to "super fast" since this announcement, but that's about
the usual. I don't believe one SELECT to a small table on each pageview
matters much, but then again, I still don't understand all the locking
issues which we seem to have. Remember the orders-of-magnitude increase in
speed after we switched the searchindex to a static copy? Yet I don't
really see why it ended up being locked so much.

Presently I see locking issues and very slow rendering of long pages (IMHO
still caused by the link checking process, but I haven't validated that
theory) as the two main causes of our dismal performance (that, and the
fact that people like us too damn much). I had hoped that Tim's links
update fix would make a big difference, but it turns out that saving long
pages is still slow because they are also *displayed* after saving them,
and it's the displaying itself that is slow.  I don't really know how much
of an impact the current 2394^34 pass parser has on the performance on
Larousse, but I wouldn't rule that out as a cause of headaches either.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 11:44, Brion Vibber wrote:
> To access the English wikipedia through pliny (the bigger server), which
> may be faster while Larousse is overloaded:
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/
>
> It's read/write for articles, but it's got a slightly outdated copy of
> the uploaded images, and I've disabled new uploads. New TeX images may
> stomp on each other too, but that can be sorted out later.

I've tweaked Special:Userlogin to redirect to en2.wikipedia.org, so if
you log in (or manually seek the other server) you may get an improved
experience, while larousse is bogged down by everyone and his brother
coming from search engines.

Poor man's load balancing until we get round-robin DNS and a real
separate other server set up. ;) Hopefully this won't put too much of a
burden on the other languages/wikis in the meantime. :(

Uploads now will go only to en2, and www is the one that'll be a little
behind until they're resynchronised. (rsync is lovely for this.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

body:
This server really seems to have a small problem...

We may have to do more tests on this computer.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion at pobox.com]
> Sent: 24 September 2003 10:00
> To: maveric149 at yahoo.com; Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
>
>
> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 23:21, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > Could somebody with access to the wikimediafoundation.org
> domain copy
> > http://meta.wikipedia.org/upload/6/68/Fundraising.html onto
> that website and
> > have it display for users when they click on
> > http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising ?
>
> Done.
>
> > Of course, I will stop the presses if our upgrades won't be
> online by that
> > time. When is that going to get done?
>
> Jason has just installed a RAM upgrade on pliny, but this caused
> mysterious crashes so we've put the old RAM back until it can
> be tested
> more thoroughly.
>
> As for the CPU upgrades for larousse, Jimmy tells me there's
> some delay
> with the shipping of parts, so we're looking at "early next week". :(
>
> The server that had held the old Wikipedias and Nupedia and some other
> stuff is back online, and we may be able to set it up temporarily as
> another Wikipedia front-end web server to help with the load.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>