subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,

No, I don't like to "make it" any number at all.  I prefer to base
my opinions on observations from real, running systems.  In my
experience, load balancers (just like any Internet router) have near
0% downtime, at most one tenth of the web server applications
involved, especially since the latter tend to be in constant
development.  If you can report differing experience, I would listen
to your arguments.  But if all you can produce is various guesses in
the 90-99 % range, this becomes pointless.  Did you ever buy a Cisco
router that had 99% availability?

> I just want to point out that availability will not increase.

I understand that this is what you want, but I still think you are
wrong.

Just to tease everybody, here is the corresponding table for
http://susning.nu/Sverige (a 44 kbyte page):

  Week       Beginning     Downtime    Slowness   Avg access time
  --------   -----------   --------    --------   ---------------
  2003-w44   27 Oct 2003     1 %          1 %        0.66 seconds
  2003-w43   20 Oct 2003     1 %          0 %        0.31
  2003-w42   13 Oct 2003     1 %          2 %        0.73
  2003-w41    6 Oct 2003     2 %          2 %        0.66
  2003-w40   29 Sep 2003     0 %          1 %        0.32
  2003-w39   22 Sep 2003     0 %          0 %        0.25
  2003-w38   15 Sep 2003     0 %         15 %        2.24
  2003-w37    8 Sep 2003     0 %         84 %        9.72 (oops!)
  2003-w36    1 Sep 2003     0 %          2 %        0.50
  2003-w35   25 Aug 2003     0 %          3 %        1.19
  2003-w34   18 Aug 2003     0 %          2 %        0.60
  2003-w33   11 Aug 2003     0 %          4 %        0.75
  2003-w32    4 Aug 2003     0 %          1 %        0.26
  2003-w31   28 Jul 2003     0 %          0 %        0.63
  2003-w30   21 Jul 2001     0 %          5 %        0.92

Once again, these are my observations, not neutral facts.  If you have
observations that differ significantly from these, please tell me.

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


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Statistics?

body:
Are there any statistics publically available?  Which SQL statements
are issued when?

Broundground for my question is: at certain times de.wikipedia is
terribly overloaded (or unresponsive) and I'd like to know the reason
why.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ramesh Hotmail

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Fw: Human Audio System Response to Modulated M
	Wavepulses SIMILAR to Thattes Brain As Information
	Transmitter an EST Phenomena.Communication Topic

body:
1 st Nov  2003

From-.
MR.RAMESH PANDURANG THATTE
B E ELECT-PUNE-1964 / M.TECH-ELECT-IIT BOMBAY-1968
SEC-B INSTITUTION OF ENGINEERS(INDIA) IN [MECH-CHEM-INDUSTRIAL]
EX IAF PILOT OFFICER ( TECH/SIGS - 11230 )
" THATTE CONSULTING ENGINEERS "
SNEHSADAN NEAR CHAMBHARLI BUS STOP PO-MOHOPADA
TAL-KHALAPUR DIST-RAIGAD.MAHARASHTRA.INDIA.PIN-410222.
TEL NO-91-02192-250004/254471
Contact 1  rpthatte at sancharnet.in  OR  arthatte at sancharnet.in
Mr THATTE'S EST phenomenon www.thatte.net  OR  http://mumbai.sancharnet.in/rpthatte
Mr Thattes [M Tech ]Identificatioin thr  http://www.alumni.iitb.ac.in/details.asp?scn=2032
Weblinks Human Auditory System Response to Modulated Micro Wave Pulses http://mumbai.sancharnet.in/rpthatte/weblinks1
Few Important weblinks Human Auditory System Response to Modulated Micro Wave Pulses.
 1.  http://members.aol.com/phikent/orbit/new174.htm  by Cain, CA and WJ Rissman
 2.   http://www.raven1.net/frey.htm    3. http://www.raven1.net/synthtel.htm
 4.  http://www.raven1.net/stocklin.htm Patent  5.  http://www.raven1.net/ravindex.htm

To-Mr Ibrahim Afghani
      Wikipedia
  Scientists, Engineers, Medicos, Political Leaders, Social Workers,Well wishers.
         SUB-Human Audio System Response to Modulated Microwave Pulses SIMILAR to Mr Thattes Brain As Information
                 Transmitter ie EST Phenomena.
  Sir,        I request help of Patrakar Sangh for publishing it.
               I am presenting My EST Phenomena almost SIMILAR to Above audio phenomena explained by Mr Alen Frey & Other Scientists from 1962 onwards.The weblinks file about Human auditory phenomenon & My EST file are attached to this e mail. I
 request help/guidence for measurement of EST phenomena.
              I request help/guidance for SENSING & RECORDING of my EST/BRAIN Waves.
              I can send some of the related files about Human Audio system Response to Modulated M wave Pulses thr e mail if requested for.
            Thanks
  By Mr Ramesh P Thatte
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list: wikien-l

from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

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

> But almost no one knows the
> middle initial of
> Elizabeth Smart, kidnap victim.

Well, thats what an encyclopedia is for, I suppose.

> I think kidnap victim is a good term for
> disambiguation in this case.

I dont. Thats why I changed it to Elizabeth Ann Smart
in the first place.

1: is has less words in it.
2. its not as clumsy
3. its not attaching to someone a "victim" status, as
if it were up to her to do something encyclopaedia
worthy that might overshadow her "victimness." Its
silly to have in a title.

~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] [Dr_Sex@telus.net: Wikipedia]

body:
>In fact I'd consider that a pretty good principle in general.  If most
>intro textbooks on the subject generally say one thing, we should say
>the same thing, even if some "authorities" disagree (though we should of
>course point out such disagreements where they exist, as in "most
>textbooks on the subject.say 'blah blah'; however X says 'blah blah'
>instead").
>
>-Mark

Well, that's just being a slave to a different master. I'm not sure we can
trust the winner of the academic dogfight either. I think of the days when
psychology was defined as behaviorism and that was what all the
introductory textbooks said, but it was mostly bull.

Fred


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 10:07:25AM -0600, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,
> > the result remains the same: One loadbalancer in front of two webservers
> > reduces availability. Simple maths.
> >
> > I also think that load balancing a farm of web servers is the way to go,
> > I just want to point out that availability will not increase.
>
> This is not only wrong, but silly at the same time.  Load balancers have
> better availability than web servers - if they didn't, nobody would even
> bother with them.  They'd just have crazy schemes where web servers
> automatically take over for each other when others go down.
>
> Plus, consider that when you add a load balancer in front of a farm of
> web servers, you no longer care about the availability of the web
> servers - because when a web server goes down, the load balancer takes
> care of it.  So, by your 90% rule of availability, given one load
> balancer and four web servers:
>
> 10% (load balancer downtime) + (.1 * .1 * .1 * .1 = .0001) = 10.0001%
> downtime.  Not noticable over just the plain 10% of having just a web
> server.  When you take into account the extra speed you get with the
> load balancer, plus the fact that load balancers are more reliable than
> web servers, it's a no brainer.

You got my point! Extra speed: yes. Extra reliability: Not really.
Not if you add a single, non clustered load balancer.

And to strengthen it: Extra speed is what we need, here I agree completely
with Lars.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Test server idea (code quality)

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>On Saturday 01 November 2003 01:17, Tim Starling wrote:
>> faster. Our code is also inelegant, poorly commented, and lacks
>> important features. All these things require work, not load management.
>
>I noticed that it is poorly commented but not that it is inelegant.

See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks under "code quality".

>And despite the poor commenting, I could do everything I wanted.

Well Ed Poor, Fred Bauder, Tarquin, Christopher Mahan and Alfio Puglisi seem
to think that more comments/documentation are necessary. So I think that
means we put more comments in, even if you, Louis and evidently the people
who wrote the code, don't need them.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 05:13:43PM +0100, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
> > I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,
>
> No, I don't like to "make it" any number at all.  I prefer to base
> my opinions on observations from real, running systems.  In my
> experience, load balancers (just like any Internet router) have near
> 0% downtime, at most one tenth of the web server applications
> involved, especially since the latter tend to be in constant
> development.

Yes, I agree, I never saw one of our Cisco load balancers go down
due to hardware failure. What James proposed was using a Linux box. In
contrast to the Cisco, this one will not have redundant power supply
and will have moving parts: fans and disk drives. And disks do fail.

The next point is detecting the failure of a node in the cluster.
Apache port responding/not responding is easy to detect. But is
the information received correct? Is the server in sync? Is the
server able to connect the database? Is the image directory up
to date? This is the area where I saw load balancers fail.

> If you can report differing experience, I would listen
> to your arguments.  But if all you can produce is various guesses in
> the 90-99 % range, this becomes pointless.  Did you ever buy a Cisco
> router that had 99% availability?

Yes. But Cisco gave us a new one to replace it. And we're not talking
about a Cisco load balancer, those are pretty expensive toys.

> > I just want to point out that availability will not increase.
>
> I understand that this is what you want, but I still think you are
> wrong.
>
>
> Just to tease everybody, here is the corresponding table for
> http://susning.nu/Sverige (a 44 kbyte page):
>
>   Week       Beginning     Downtime    Slowness   Avg access time
>   --------   -----------   --------    --------   ---------------
>   2003-w44   27 Oct 2003     1 %          1 %        0.66 seconds
>   2003-w43   20 Oct 2003     1 %          0 %        0.31
>   2003-w42   13 Oct 2003     1 %          2 %        0.73
>   2003-w41    6 Oct 2003     2 %          2 %        0.66
>   2003-w40   29 Sep 2003     0 %          1 %        0.32
>   2003-w39   22 Sep 2003     0 %          0 %        0.25
>   2003-w38   15 Sep 2003     0 %         15 %        2.24
>   2003-w37    8 Sep 2003     0 %         84 %        9.72 (oops!)
>   2003-w36    1 Sep 2003     0 %          2 %        0.50
>   2003-w35   25 Aug 2003     0 %          3 %        1.19
>   2003-w34   18 Aug 2003     0 %          2 %        0.60
>   2003-w33   11 Aug 2003     0 %          4 %        0.75
>   2003-w32    4 Aug 2003     0 %          1 %        0.26
>   2003-w31   28 Jul 2003     0 %          0 %        0.63
>   2003-w30   21 Jul 2001     0 %          5 %        0.92
>
> Once again, these are my observations, not neutral facts.  If you have
> observations that differ significantly from these, please tell me.

OK, several possible conclusions:
- Susning might have less hits than wikipedia
- Susning's software might be better than the current MediaWiki release
- Susning might be running on a hell of a machine
- ....

The only thing you prove by these figures is that Susning is faster.
And I agree that this has to change. Wikipedia should be as fast
as Susning. Clustering is the way to achieve this. But several
different ways to implement a cluster are available. The classical
ones are
* a load balancer, either special hardware or a routing software running
  on a normal server, in front of the web servers or
* a cluster software like "heartbeat", "Sun Cluster" or "IBM HACMP"
  running on the web server nodes, taking over services when the other
  cluster partner dies.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> OK, several possible conclusions:
> - Susning might have less hits than wikipedia
> - Susning's software might be better than the current MediaWiki release
> - Susning might be running on a hell of a machine
> - ....

Susning is in Swedish, limiting the possible audience to 9 million
people plus Googlebot, so it should have less traffic than the English
Wikipedia.  Still, it pumped 50 GB of traffic (8 million hits) in
October, comparable to the German Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has had
performance problems long before it had this much traffic.

> The only thing you prove by these figures is that Susning is faster.

Yes, because this is the *only* thing that counts.  Fix Wikipedia's
response times and nobody will care about the architecture.  I think
you all focus too much on architecture and too little on time.

The focus on wallclock time is what drives my development of susning.

Think of wallclock time as a budget. You're spending 8.50 seconds on
each request, and this is too much.  Apparently it was possible in
August to serve requests and only spend 1.5 seconds on each.

What would Alan Greenspan do? He would ask you to break down the sum.
Where are the first 0.5 seconds spent?  The next 0.5 secs?  The next?
Alan Greenspan would not fire you for spending 8.50 seconds, but he
would fire you if you can't answer how they are spent, since that
means you are out of control.

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Afrikaans wikipedia - unable to edit

body:
On Nov 2, 2003, at 03:14, Ian Gilfillan wrote:

> There's been a problem for the past few days?on the Afrikaans
> wikipedia. Everytime I try and preview/edit, I get:

For future reference, when this occurs do:

http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi?action=unlock

This fixes up a problem with the old software where it sometimes
doesn't clear its lock file and so thinks that someone else is trying
to save a page at the same time, and backs off waiting... and
waiting... until it gives up. The above command clears the lock
manually.

I'm going to have to see if I can change the address in the config; Lee
isn't really involved in Wikipedia much anymore.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Photos from http://www.sxc.hu/

body:
On Nov 2, 2003, at 03:35, Jurriaan Schulman wrote:

> Is there any reason why one couldn't use pictures from
> http://www.sxc.hu/
> for wikipedia?

<IANAL>

http://www.sxc.hu/info.phtml?f=terms

"1.) You may use any of the photos in our system free of charge for any
commercial or personal design work if you obey the specified
restrictions concerning each photo you download."

The license terms for individual pictures will vary, so be careful to
check them.

"2.) Selling these photos (individually, or as a whole) without written
permission is prohibited. Using the photos in website templates, on
postcards, mugs etc. doesn't count as selling."

This sounds kind of vague, but the GNU Free Documentation License does
*not* prohibit selling works, and *does* prohibit further restrictions.
Wikipedia articles or derivatives of them may be printed, pressed, or
taped and sold (in addition to being given away for free or cost of
reproduction). Just something to consider.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
I wonder if one person could volunteer to email them and sell them on
using the GNU FDL for their images.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 2, 2003, at 03:35, Jurriaan Schulman wrote:
>
> >Is there any reason why one couldn't use pictures from
> >http://www.sxc.hu/
> >for wikipedia?
>
> <IANAL>
>
> http://www.sxc.hu/info.phtml?f=terms
>
> "1.) You may use any of the photos in our system free of charge for any
> commercial or personal design work if you obey the specified
> restrictions concerning each photo you download."
>
> The license terms for individual pictures will vary, so be careful to
> check them.
>
> "2.) Selling these photos (individually, or as a whole) without written
> permission is prohibited. Using the photos in website templates, on
> postcards, mugs etc. doesn't count as selling."
>
> This sounds kind of vague, but the GNU Free Documentation License does
> *not* prohibit selling works, and *does* prohibit further restrictions.
> Wikipedia articles or derivatives of them may be printed, pressed, or
> taped and sold (in addition to being given away for free or cost of
> reproduction). Just something to consider.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
> > 10% (load balancer downtime) + (.1 * .1 * .1 * .1 = .0001) = 10.0001%
> > downtime.  Not noticable over just the plain 10% of having just a web
> > server.  When you take into account the extra speed you get with the
> > load balancer, plus the fact that load balancers are more reliable than
> > web servers, it's a no brainer.
>
> You got my point! Extra speed: yes. Extra reliability: Not really.
> Not if you add a single, non clustered load balancer.
>
> And to strengthen it: Extra speed is what we need, here I agree completely
> with Lars.

Well, I got your point, but you didn't get mine.  What I say above is
that reliability with load balancers with be worse (on average) if, and
only if, load balancers had the same reliability as web servers.  They
don't - they're more reliable than web servers, and thus, our
reliability should go up.

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


from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikitech-l] software delivery vision

body:
As we all know wikipedia is a bitch to set up. now that we are talking about switching from one
distro to another, it will be even more of a bitch to set up.

Here is the solution:  UML, user mode linux (it lets you run an complet emulation of linux inside
your own linux box). So: instead of telling people they need php 4.3.2 and apache 2.0.48 with this
and that compile option (a combination which might not be available to some distros), simply: use
dd to create a running image that people can run right off the bat (they could probably use the
thing that lets you run linux inside windows as well...).

The beautiful thing about UML is that it has no hardware requirements: eg no kernel compile need
be done by the image makers (like knoppix for example which just throws every imaginable driver on
there), eg up and running within minutes.

But does the beauty of this idea stop here ?  NO. This is fine for testing purposes (running a
slow UML image that is), but if someone wants to run wikipedia without limits then they can simply
find a kernel that works for their machine, drop it into the image (maybe a small touch of hacking
required by us to create a utility to drop a kernel in), and then use a tool designed to plop
images directly onto a harddrive (like the proprietary "symantec ghost").

Aside from allowing the world an unprecentedly easy way to hack,tinker,consider,or use wikipedia
on their own, this process will make operations inside wikipedia easier.  Yes, all code should be
included in this image, the database code the web code: so that any machine can be an: all-in-one,
or database-only  eg...with an /etc/wikipedia-node.conf   file (this would help when new machines
come in AND when important machines go down).

This idea originally spawned out of the fact that all parts of wikipedia's code are not on
sourceforge, when i asked why i was told "there is some site specific code". The only thing that
is site specific in my mind are the passwords everything else should be exactly what the public is
getting, down to the byte. And its great to make it in an extrememly easy to use format as well
which defeats the difficult-to-setup aspect.

Well as I hope you can understand, its better for all that its wholly open setup and why not make
it easy!

I hereby declare wikipedia an OS.

-Hunter Peress

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jurriaan-
> Is there any reason why one couldn't use pictures from http://www.sxc.hu/
> for wikipedia?

Nice find! Using these photos should be no problem if there are no
individual usage restrictions on the photo in question. The only
problematic part of their Terms of Use which I can see is the following:

---
3.) You are not allowed to use any of the images found herein for the
purpose of spreading hate or discrimination, or to defame or victimise
other people, sociteties, cultures.

        from http://www.sxc.hu/info.phtml?f=terms
---

However, this is from the Terms of Use of the website itself, and not a
required condition for uploaders, but for downloaders. So I doubt it has
any real legal effect.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jurriaan Schulman

body:
Is there any reason why one couldn't use pictures from http://www.sxc.hu/
for wikipedia?

Jurriaan


from_name: Ian Gilfillan

body:
hi

There's been a problem for the past few days on the Afrikaans wikipedia. Everytime I try and preview/edit, I get:

----
Software error:
Could not get editing lock at /home/usemod/wiki-af/work-http/wiki.cgi line 3224.

For help, please send mail to the webmaster (lee at piclab.com), giving this error message and the time and date of the error.

-----

I've sent messages to that address, but since the software is old, I guess the email is too.

thanks,

ian gilfillan

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from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] bot parsing for interwiki links

body:
Hello,

I am known as Hashar on irc and fr.wikipedia.

I am currently developping a php script that aims to help me updating
interwiki (also known as interlangage links). I am posting there so the
community know about what's I am doing and mainly to prevent any crash of
the server that might be cause by my script.

This is what I am doing:

Script is running on my local workstation using php and my cable connection
in France. It operates following this script:

1/ ask user for an article to check
2/ retrieve article and parse for interwiki links
3/ retrieve one of the interwiki link and parse it for interwiki links
4/ repeat 3 until all interwiki links of 2 have been parsed.
5/ display for each wikipedia the number of interwiki and a list of them.

It doesn't manage redirect yet.

This is an output result on a test I made this morning (while american are
sleeping and european not yet awake as to minimize risks). I was browsing
the site while it was running and didn't notice any slowdown.

----- SCRIPT OUTPUT -----
Enter the name of an article on the fr wikip?dia.Wikilinks will be checked
on
(ar|ms|bs|cs|cy|da|de|el|en|es|eo|fr|fy|hi|hr|he|ko|hu|ml|nah|nl|ja|pl|ro|
ru|sq|sk|sl|sr|sv|tr|zh) wikipedias.
> Espagne [OK]

Current wikilink(s) for this article:
fr (11 interwiki):
[[da:Spanien]] [[de:Spanien]] [[en:Spain]] [[es:Espa?a]] [[eo:Hispanio]]
[[nl:Spanje]] [[ja:スペイン]] [[pl:Hiszpania]]
[[ro:Spania]] [[sv:Spanien]] [[zh:西班牙]]

Number and wikilinks on the linked wikis:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
da (11 interwiki):
[[en:Spain]] [[de:Spanien]] [[eo:Hispanio]] [[es:Espa?a]] [[fr:Espagne]]
[[ja:スペイン]] [[nl:Spanje]] [[pl:Hiszpania]]
[[ro:Spania]] [[sv:Spanien]] [[zh:西班牙]]
de (11 interwiki):
[[da:Spanien]] [[en:Spain]] [[eo:Hispanio]] [[es:Espa?a]] [[fr:Espagne]]
[[ja:スペイン]] [[nl:Spanje]] [[pl:Hiszpania]]
[[ro:Spania]] [[sv:Spanien]] [[zh:%E8%A5%BF%E7%8F%AD%E7%89%99]]
es (10 interwiki):
[[da:Spanien]] [[de:Spanien]] [[en:Spain]] [[eo:Hispanio]] [[fr:Espagne]]
[[ja:スペイン]] [[nl:Spanje]] [[pl:Hiszpania]]
[[sv:Spanien]] [[zh:西班牙]]
eo (8 interwiki):
[[de:Spanien]] [[en:Spain]] [[fr:Espagne]] [[es:Espa??a]]
[[ja:スペイン]] [[nl:Spanje]] [[pl:Hiszpania]]
[[ro:Spania]]
ja (0 interwiki):
doesn't got any interwiki link.

----- END SCRIPT OUTPUT -----
NB: I removed lot of entries to make things clearer.

>From this script output we can see that there is at most 11 interwiki. Eo
wiki is missing 3 of them, es wiki is missing one, ja doesn't seem to be
linked (must be a script bug :p ).

Before I work more on this idea, what's your reaction about that ? Do you
find it usefull ?
Should it be spread to some server operator around the wikipedias ?

Followup either here or on my talk page.

:0?

--
Ashar Voultoiz
[[Hashar]] @ fr.wikipedia.org


body:
Ian Gilfillan wrote:
> There's been a problem for the past few days on the Afrikaans
> wikipedia. Everytime I try and preview/edit, I get:
> ----
> Software error:
> Could not get editing lock at /home/usemod/wiki-af/work-http/wiki.cgi line 3224.

Try to access the magic URL ..../wiki.cgi?action=unlock
and see if that helps.  This is standard procedure in UseModWiki.

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


from_name: Rob Hooft

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am known as Hashar on irc and fr.wikipedia.
>
> I am currently developping a php script that aims to help me updating
> interwiki (also known as interlangage links). I am posting there so the
> community know about what's I am doing and mainly to prevent any crash of
> the server that might be cause by my script.

What you describe is one of the robots implemented in the
pywikipediabot, available via sourceforge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot

That software does handle redirects and a lot of other
wikipedia-intricacies. If you have any other wishes, we can have a look
at them. You're welcome to join the team and bring in your experience.

Regards,

Rob

--
Rob W.W. Hooft  ||  rob at hooft.net  ||  http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bot parsing for interwiki links

body:
On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 16:08:12 +0100, Rob Hooft wrote:

> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am known as Hashar on irc and fr.wikipedia.
>>
>> I am currently developping a php script that aims to help me updating
>> interwiki (also known as interlangage links). I am posting there so the
>> community know about what's I am doing and mainly to prevent any crash of
>> the server that might be cause by my script.
>
> What you describe is one of the robots implemented in the
> pywikipediabot, available via sourceforge.net:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot
>
> That software does handle redirects and a lot of other
> wikipedia-intricacies. If you have any other wishes, we can have a look
> at them. You're welcome to join the team and bring in your experience.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rob

Well I started my script yesterday night :0) Guess it is time for me to
install python and learn it :)

Will come back to the list once I have practiced with the pyton bot.

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contact us (was: [m.bomb@verizon.net: wikipedia])

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>There seems to be a trend lately of people writing
>to me personally to complain about articles.
>
>I'm half joking here, but possibly we should have a
>link "Complain about this article".  But when
>people click on it, we say "Hey, don't complain,
>get involved!  Go back and click 'edit this page'.
>But first, please read _this_, _that_, and _the
>other_ to understand what's going on around here."

Well your email is listed as the main contact on the
donation page, so that may explain why (as soon as we
have a Wikimedia-l mailing list I'll switch your email
address with that). What is needed is for us to
replace 'Bug reports' in the sidebar with 'Contact
us'. Then we can have a direct link to the mailing
list (and also some text telling people to use
'discuss this page' to comment on articles). Of course
a list admin will have to approve the email for
listing, but once that is done then anybody can answer
the post.

That is how we do things at Wikibooks anyway.

http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Contact_us

Oh, and if this is implemented then I volunteer to
help with enwiki-l list admin tasks.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


body:
On Nov 2, 2003, at 17:13, Jake Nelson wrote:
>>
> How hard would it be to make it put that unlock link in the error
> message?
> Just a thought.

I believe UseModWiki 1.0 will unlock automatically; I'll check if
there's any problem with just dropping in the newer script.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Statistics?

in_reply_to:
<sh1xsshw1k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> (Karl Eichwalder's message
	of "Sat, 01 Nov 2003 17:51:19 +0100")

body:
Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> writes:

> Are there any statistics publically available?  Which SQL statements
> are issued when?
>
> Broundground for my question is: at certain times de.wikipedia is
> terribly overloaded (or unresponsive) and I'd like to know the reason
> why.

Today the same again.  Is the the time when google fetches the whole
thing?  I cannot access the German WP for more than 13' - accessing the
English version works, more or less instantly.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Jake Nelson

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Nov 2, 2003, at 03:14, Ian Gilfillan wrote:
>
> > There's been a problem for the past few days on the Afrikaans
> > wikipedia. Everytime I try and preview/edit, I get:
>
> For future reference, when this occurs do:
>
> http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi?action=unlock
>
> This fixes up a problem with the old software where it sometimes
> doesn't clear its lock file and so thinks that someone else is trying
> to save a page at the same time, and backs off waiting... and
> waiting... until it gives up. The above command clears the lock
> manually.
>
> I'm going to have to see if I can change the address in the config; Lee
> isn't really involved in Wikipedia much anymore.
>
How hard would it be to make it put that unlock link in the error message?
Just a thought.

-- Jake


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.de points to domain seller

body:
Hello,

Some people on the German wikipedia noticed that http://www.wikipedia.de
points no longer to de.wikipedia.org but to a completely different site
which has a frappant similarity to a link farm.

What did happen here? Most people, reading about wikipedia in the
newspapers, first try the .de-adress. This could seriously damage our
reputation.

greetings,
elian

$ whois wikipedia.de

domain:      wikipedia.de
descr:       Thomas Dolezal
descr:       Neustiftgasse 2
descr:       A-2500 Baden
nserver:     ns1.domainname.at
nserver:     ns2.domainname.at
status:      connect
changed:     20031101 152525
source:      DENIC

[admin-c][tech-c][zone-c]
Type:         PERSON
Name:         Thomas Dolezal
Address:      Langenlohe 11
City:         Wiesenthau
Pcode:        91369
Country:      DE
Phone:        +49-162-5643392
Fax:          +49-9191-163751
Email:        thomas at webagentur.at
Remarks:      td1
Changed:      20030823 000829
Source:       DENIC


from_name: Andrew Alder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Banned user protection on the Meta?

body:
It appears that a hard-banned user from the English Wikipedia is now active
on the Meta, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Contributions_by_142.177.xxx.xxx

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Any_banned_user_protection_for_Meta?

(sorry I can't make the second link work properly, Eudora doesn't want to
include the '?' in the link).

Any advice as to how to handle the Meta contributions would be appreciated.
As I said in the Village Pump, there are some good points being made, just
in the wrong place IMO. They are provocative and interesting, but IMO some
of them don't belong in Wikipedia at all (even the Meta), and there's
considerable risk of myself and others wasting time if we're not careful.

This is my first post to any Wikipedia mailing list. It was suggested on
the Pump that it should be raised on the English Wikipedia list, but it
seems to me to better fit the guidelines for this one.

Andrew Alder
Wikipedian andrewa

****
andrewa @ alder . ws
http://www.zeta.org.au/~andrewa
Phone 9441 4476
Mobile 04 2525 4476
****

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from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Statistics?

body:
>
>Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> writes:
>
>> Are there any statistics publically available?  Which SQL statements
>> are issued when?
>>
>> Broundground for my question is: at certain times de.wikipedia is
>> terribly overloaded (or unresponsive) and I'd like to know the reason
>> why.
>
>Today the same again.  Is the the time when google fetches the whole
>thing?  I cannot access the German WP for more than 13' - accessing the
>English version works, more or less instantly.
>

You can find statistics on http://de.wikipedia.org/stats for the german wiki and http://www.wikipedia.org/stats for english wiki.

Wikipedia is slow, because the two servers we're using are very overloaded. We should soon get a new dual-opteron which will become the db server.


subject: [Wikitech-l] software delivery vision

body:
Hunter Peress wrote:
> Here is the solution: UML, user mode linux (it lets you run an
> complet emulation of linux inside your own linux box).

While I'm not opposed to someone doing this, it's a pretty nonstandard
way of doing things, isn't it?

> So: instead of telling people they need php 4.3.2 and apache 2.0.48
> with this and that compile option (a combination which might not be
> available to some distros), simply: use dd to create a running image
> that people can run right off the bat (they could probably use the
> thing that lets you run linux inside windows as well...).

Hmmm, I think a better approach (meaning, more mainstream in the *nix
world) would be to examine to what degree we do have unnecessary
dependence on particular versions of this, that, and the other.

And then work to make sure someone can download, untar, configure,
make, make test, make install and have it be likely that everything
would work.

If you're talking about having a standalone reader, then Magnus's work
seems like the right way to go with that.

But if you're talking about having an easy-to-install full version of
MediaWiki, well, it *is* a website, not a standalone app, and so
there's going to *have* to be some work for the end user in terms of
making sure that the prerequisites are installed.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Brion raised the question the other day about the possibility of
storing the images directly in the database.  Part or all of the
motivation was to make it easy for multiple webservers to serve
consistent images on the site in our new configuration.

I've been thinking of other ways to do this.

1.  NFS -- all the webservers could have read/write access to an NFS
partition, probably on the new machine.  This is easy to setup, but
there are questions about the security and stability of NFS, and at
least a few years ago, it was considered by some to be bad mojo to try
to serve web content off of NFS-mounted partitions -- performance is
bad.

2.  AFS - Andrew File System, or DRBD - Distributed Replicated Block
Device --- These sound to me like things that hold forth great
promise, but I also regard them as fairly esoteric technologies.
We're probably better off doing something more boring.

Am I wrong?  Too conservative?  Not up to date?

3.  Apache reverse proxying -- this is a boring and good solution that
I'm confident would work well, but it does have some drawbacks.
Essentially, the way it works is this: for image uploads and
downloads, we mod_rewrite to transparently reverse proxy the requests
to apache running on the backend (database) machine.

One possible drawback is the overhead of apache running on the
backend, and the fact that it might become a bottleneck.  However,
since almost all the backend machine would be doing is static
requests, and since those could be shunted to something faster than
apache, it really wouldn't be all that hard.

--------

Hybrid approaches are possible -- the webservers could NFS mount the
/images/ directory from the db machine but only use the NFS
mountpoints for writing -- for reads, we'd go through the reverse
proxying mechanism.

--Jimbo


from_name: Dufrenoy, Alexis

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Yes, I started to read the code, but it's not easy without documentation (I
saw the existing, and it's really weak) and with almost no comment. But I
didn't give up, and the good thing is : I can easily improve the code. I
just have to add comments. And I can easily improve the whole software. I
just have to write doc.

Traroth

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Tim Starling [mailto:ts4294967296 at hotmail.com]
Gesendet: Freitag, 31. Oktober 2003 01:30
An: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Betreff: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:

* Don't know PHP/MySQL
* Poor documentation, can't understand the code
* Wouldn't know where to start
* Don't have a test server
* Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
be tedious and frustrating

Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
contributing again for reasons such as those above?

If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to
contribute?

If you prefer, you can contact me privately at tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau.

-- Tim Starling.

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


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] mirror sites?

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> Oops, I hadn't read that tinyweb mail when I sent
> this. I can't get it to run, though.

Is it the tinyweb server that's not running, or the waikiki program
itself? If you go command line at www\cgi-bin, and type
	Waikiki.exe -title="A"
it should give you the HTML of the "A" article.

If that works, you can skip the tinyweb server and use apache, which is
recommended for mirror sites anyway :-)

Magnus


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Why not just serve the images from images.wikipedia.org (which I
imagine would resolve to the database machine for the moment).  Am I
missing some key point that makes something fancier necessary?

Jason

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Brion raised the question the other day about the possibility of
> storing the images directly in the database.  Part or all of the
> motivation was to make it easy for multiple webservers to serve
> consistent images on the site in our new configuration.
>
> I've been thinking of other ways to do this.
>
> 1.  NFS -- all the webservers could have read/write access to an NFS
> partition, probably on the new machine.  This is easy to setup, but
> there are questions about the security and stability of NFS, and at
> least a few years ago, it was considered by some to be bad mojo to try
> to serve web content off of NFS-mounted partitions -- performance is
> bad.
>
> 2.  AFS - Andrew File System, or DRBD - Distributed Replicated Block
> Device --- These sound to me like things that hold forth great
> promise, but I also regard them as fairly esoteric technologies.
> We're probably better off doing something more boring.
>
> Am I wrong?  Too conservative?  Not up to date?
>
> 3.  Apache reverse proxying -- this is a boring and good solution that
> I'm confident would work well, but it does have some drawbacks.
> Essentially, the way it works is this: for image uploads and
> downloads, we mod_rewrite to transparently reverse proxy the requests
> to apache running on the backend (database) machine.
>
> One possible drawback is the overhead of apache running on the
> backend, and the fact that it might become a bottleneck.  However,
> since almost all the backend machine would be doing is static
> requests, and since those could be shunted to something faster than
> apache, it really wouldn't be all that hard.
>
> --------
>
> Hybrid approaches are possible -- the webservers could NFS mount the
> /images/ directory from the db machine but only use the NFS
> mountpoints for writing -- for reads, we'd go through the reverse
> proxying mechanism.
>
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Jason Richey wrote:
> Why not just serve the images from images.wikipedia.org (which I
> imagine would resolve to the database machine for the moment).  Am I
> missing some key point that makes something fancier necessary?

My inherent love for complexity?  ;-)

Hmmm, well, let me think.  A fancy-enough reverse proxying system
could cache images on the frontend machine so that we only have to
bother the database machine for write and occassional reads, whereas
serving all the images directly from the db machine is going to be a
fair amount of traffic.

On the other hand, since images are always going to be different from
article data in some important ways, then *whatever* we do, a switch
to images.wikipedia.org is probably a very good idea.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> images.wikimedia.org would be better since it would be
> usable by all Wikimedia projects.

Hmm, well, it is going to be usable by all Wikimedia projects no
matter what we call it.

> Which reminds me: Why hasn't this list been moved to
> wikitech-l at wikimedia.org yet? Wikipedia-l has been...

I don't really object, but just note that these moves have been done
without my conscious knowledge or support or opposition.  I'm not
really clear on what the point is, actually.

It does make sense to me that stuff having to do primarily with
wikipedia, such as wikipedia-l for example, should be on
wikipedia.org, while stuff having to do with the foundation as a
whole, encompassing more than just the flagship encyclopedia, should
be on wikimedia, like the legal mailing list, etc.

Is there any reason why we should move *all* the mailing lists to
wikimedia?

Both addresses work, so in reality does it make any difference?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Jason wrote:
>Why not just serve the images from
>images.wikipedia.org (which I imagine would resolve
>to the database machine for the moment).  Am I
>missing some key point that makes something fancier
>necessary?

images.wikimedia.org would be better since it would be
usable by all Wikimedia projects.

Which reminds me: Why hasn't this list been moved to
wikitech-l at wikimedia.org yet? Wikipedia-l has been...
For that matter mail.wikipedia.org,
download.wikipedia.org, test.wikipedia.org and
meta.wikipedia.org should also be moved to the
wikimedia.org domain.

And before anybody mentions that I could move it,
please consider pointing me to some tutorials on how
to do it and then give me the necessary developer
access. I wouldn't mind doing some of the more mundane
development tasks to free up some time for the real
developers, but I really should know what I'm doing
first. ;)

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 2, 2003, at 03:35, Jurriaan Schulman wrote:
>
> > Is there any reason why one couldn't use pictures from
> > http://www.sxc.hu/
> > for wikipedia?
>
> <IANAL>
>
> http://www.sxc.hu/info.phtml?f=terms
>
> "1.) You may use any of the photos in our system free of charge for any
> commercial or personal design work if you obey the specified
> restrictions concerning each photo you download."
>
> The license terms for individual pictures will vary, so be careful to
> check them.

I have already downloaded several pictures from the site to Wikipedia. Most
do not have extra restrictions, but some do. Extra restrictions can be:
* notification of the author is required
* notification of the author and attribution are required
* permission of the author is needed

In general I have preferred to use pictures without further requirements,
but when none available, the first two have been used too, with a "this
picture does not fall under the GNU/FDL" added.

Also, I think it is considered good manners on the site to notify the
author that you have used their picture on Wikipedia even if such is not
explicitly requested.

> "2.) Selling these photos (individually, or as a whole) without written
> permission is prohibited. Using the photos in website templates, on
> postcards, mugs etc. doesn't count as selling."
>
> This sounds kind of vague, but the GNU Free Documentation License does
> *not* prohibit selling works, and *does* prohibit further restrictions.
> Wikipedia articles or derivatives of them may be printed, pressed, or
> taped and sold (in addition to being given away for free or cost of
> reproduction). Just something to consider.

On the other hand, the GNU/FDL does require that the source is also
available, and that people are allowed to download and further spread it.
Under such conditions, it will be hard to effectively sell the pictures -
especially since any selling of 'picture in a special form' seems ok.

In general, I would say it's strange to skim such licences for every small
thing that would make them non-GNU/FDL compliable, and at the same time
happily leave pictures that are much more suspect on our server.

Andre Engels


body:
On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Rob Hooft wrote:

> What you describe is one of the robots implemented in the
> pywikipediabot, available via sourceforge.net:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot
>
> That software does handle redirects and a lot of other
> wikipedia-intricacies. If you have any other wishes, we can have a look
> at them. You're welcome to join the team and bring in your experience.

Having some experience with Rob's bot (and done some minor coding on it
too), I can say that I can recommend it. It is currently being used on nl:
(by Rob and me) and on da: (by Christian List), while I have also made a
run of it on fy:. For other languages, I would like to hear which languages
would allow the usage of such a bot. If wanted, I can do a trial run on a
smaller number of pages, so people can see whether it is running correctly.

The best thing would be to have an operator (or more) for each language,
but if nobody is willing & able, I would not mind doing several other
languages as well.

There are also some more bots there, among them a bot that is used to help
in doing disambiguation (this one I have been running on en: under username
Robbot). It also contains a library (wikipedia.py) so it can be used for
programming other automatic or machine-aided edits on Wikipedia as well.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
On Nov 3, 2003, at 10:28, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Is there any reason why we should move *all* the mailing lists to
> wikimedia?
>
> Both addresses work, so in reality does it make any difference?

The only practical difference atm is that wikipedia.org is still
missing the backup MX record, so if pliny is down mail sent to
wikipedia.org addresses won't go through until it gets resent when
pliny is back up, hours later.

wikipedia.org.          3600    IN      MX      10 pliny.wikipedia.org.

wikimedia.org.          86400   IN      MX      10 mail.wikipedia.org.
wikimedia.org.          86400   IN      MX      50 mormo.org.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Big picture issues (was: cluster and images)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Anything which is usable by all Wikimedia project
> needs to be at a project-neutral domain. Would it not
> be odd to have Wikipedia's images at
> images.wikibooks.org?

Yes, about as odd as having Wikipedia's images at
images.wikimedia.org, right?

> Because we are all part of Wikimedia. In an offlist
> post to me you also added your support to moving meta
> to the wikimedia.org domain. Moving mail.wikipedia.org
> is a natural extension of that and it would then be
> logical to depreciate @wikipedia.org for
> @wikimedia.org.

O.k., I'm not against any of this.  Meta, in particular, is a real
curiosity these days.  No one seems to know what what it's for.

I don't disagree with any of the rest of what you wrote, either.

--Jimbo


body:
Jimbo wrote:
>Hmm, well, it is going to be usable by all Wikimedia
>projects no matter what we call it.

Anything which is usable by all Wikimedia project
needs to be at a project-neutral domain. Would it not
be odd to have Wikipedia's images at
images.wikibooks.org?

>>Which reminds me: Why hasn't this list been moved to
>>wikitech-l at wikimedia.org yet? Wikipedia-l has...

>I don't really object, but just note that these moves

>have been done without my conscious knowledge or
>support or opposition.  I'm not really clear on what
>the point is, actually.

Because we are all part of Wikimedia. In an offlist
post to me you also added your support to moving meta
to the wikimedia.org domain. Moving mail.wikipedia.org
is a natural extension of that and it would then be
logical to depreciate @wikipedia.org for
@wikimedia.org.

>It does make sense to me that stuff having to do
>primarily with wikipedia, such as wikipedia-l for
>example, should be on wikipedia.org, while stuff
>having to do with the foundation as a whole,
>encompassing more than just the flagship
>encyclopedia, should be on wikimedia, like the legal
>mailing list, etc.

Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia. To help with a
cultural shift to become less Wikipedia-centric,
moving the Wikipedia-related mailing lists to the
wikimedial.org domain makes perfect sense. Otherwise
each project will want to have their own mail.<project
name>.org subdomain. That means we will have more
subdomains to set-up and maintain and the different
projects will be more isolated from each other than
need be.

We are /all/ one super-community here - Wikimedia -
thus we should all share things such as mailing list
domains, image space, meta, log-ins etc. This will
tend to bind us all together, instead of being
separate projects which happen to be on the same
server. People from one project should be reminded
where it makes sense that there are other Wikimedia
projects. This will encourage cross-polination of
ideas and also help to make sure projects do not
duplicate work (no need for textbooks in Wikipedia, no
need for dictionary entries in Wikibooks etc).

>Is there any reason why we should move *all* the
>mailing lists to wikimedia?

See above. If the language-specific lists are also
moved then they should be renamed in this format:
WikipediaXx-l. Brion has already stated that this
should not pose technical problems and should in fact
be fairly easy to do. It would also be confusing to
have a mix of @wikipedia.org and @wikimedia.org
mailing lists laying around - they are too similar and
it is not apparent that they both work. Best to have
just one and it is best to have that be at a
project-neutral domain name.

Oh, it would also be nice to have "A [Wikimedia]
project" under the logo of every Wikipedia project.
[Wikimedia] would be a link to the Foundation's home
page. This would be another thing we could do to help
enforce the idea that we are all together and also
help direct the energies of newbies to the right
projects.

Big picture issues.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav - hopeless INTJ mastermind)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


body:
I wrote:
>Oh, it would also be nice to have "A [Wikimedia]
>project" under the logo of every Wikipedia project.
>[Wikimedia] would be a link to the Foundation's home
>page. ...

Grr. Replace "every Wikipedia project" with "every
Wikimedia project." Yes, even I am still struggling
with my Wikipedia-centratism.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
Jimbo:
>Yes, about as odd as having Wikipedia's images at
>images.wikimedia.org, right?

Not in the least. Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia. It
is perfectly logical and the people who would be
surprised probably don't know about the Wikimedia
Foundation yet. That should spark some curiosity and
result is them learning that there is a larger
community creating all sorts of free content.

Images should be a resource that are easily usable by
all Wikimedia projects and language versions. All one
should have to do is upload an image once and then
link to it from any Wikimedia project or language
version. That is why images.wikimedia.org makes sense.

>O.k., I'm not against any of this.

Great! Now we just need to implement it. I volunteer
to help but I don't yet have the knowledge to do so or
the access. I will learn (any links would be helpful).

>Meta, in particular, is a real curiosity these days.
>No one seems to know what what it's for.

The main purpose of meta overlaps with the purpose of
the mailing lists (discuss the Wikimedia projects).
But meta is a wiki and is thus ill-suited to threaded
discussions (and yes I'm breaking threads right now
because I'm writing from work and using webmail).

In the future I would love to see us move away from
the mailing lists and use meta more. Then it would be
more natural to distill the discussion into meta
pages. But that requires MediaWiki features that
simply do not exist yet.

-- mav

__________________________________
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from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big picture issues

body:
Note: I deleted the stuff I agree with completely.

> Anything which is usable by all Wikimedia project
> needs to be at a project-neutral domain. Would it
> not
> be odd to have Wikipedia's images at
> images.wikibooks.org?
>
IMHO it'd make a lot more sense to have it at
images.wikimedia.org, but images.wikibooks.org would
still be ok.

>
>
> We are /all/ one super-community here - Wikimedia -
> thus we should all share things such as mailing list
> domains, image space, meta, log-ins etc. This will
> tend to bind us all together, instead of being
> separate projects which happen to be on the same
> server. People from one project should be reminded
> where it makes sense that there are other Wikimedia
> projects. This will encourage cross-polination of
> ideas and also help to make sure projects do not
> duplicate work (no need for textbooks in Wikipedia,
> no
> need for dictionary entries in Wikibooks etc).
>
>  Big picture issues
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav - hopeless INTJ mastermind)

That's a good idea, but aren't there some big
technical problems with merging everything (except for
the mailing lists)? For example, what if there are two
different pictures with the same name? Should one of
them be deleted? Should they each be prefixed with a
language code or something and then bots will go
through and change all of the articles that link to
them? The same goes for logins. And why would merging
logins fix the problem of people not going to the
right wiki?
LDan

__________________________________
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body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Images should be a resource that are easily usable by
> all Wikimedia projects and language versions. All one
> should have to do is upload an image once and then
> link to it from any Wikimedia project or language
> version. That is why images.wikimedia.org makes sense.

Yes, perhaps.  I agree with the spirit of what you're saying here, but
I think that there's a bit of complexity, too.

Let's say we have a picture on wikipedia, let's say it's a photo of an
elephant at the San Diego zoo.  It's used on wikipedia as an
illustration for the San Diego zoo article.

I am writing my 3rd grade science textbook, and I link to that same
picture.  In the text, I write about that picture.  "As you can see
from the photo, elephants love to throw dirt on their backs with their
trunks."

But later someone comes along and changes the photo in the San Diego
zoo article.  It's still an elephant at the San Diego zoo, but a
different one.  And no dirt is being thrown.

So, I think that when different articles or different books use the
same images, they *each* need to make a local copy.

So, for images, I think it makes a lot of sense to have
images.wikipedia.org
images.wikibooks.org

and so on.

The same problem exists for various languages, of course.

I'm just saying that "available for use by any Wikimedia project"
doesn't necessarily imply that the images need to be all put onto one
big server.

Actually, a very sensible thing to do, I should think, would be
to eventually have images.wikipedia.org, for live images used
on the encyclopedia, images.wikibooks.org, etc. but ALSO to have
images.wikimedia.org.

And images.wikimedia.org would be a project unto itself, so to speak,
where images are collected (perhaps automatically) and copied from the
other projects, and given neutral captions, and entered into a big
image library.  The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very
strict, not relying on fair use.  All images would have to be public
domain or GNU FDL or something compatible.

And then if people needed an image for something, they could just copy
it from there.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Big picture issues

body:
LDan wrote:
>That's a good idea, but aren't there some big
>technical problems with merging everything (except
for
>the mailing lists)? For example, what if there are
two
>different pictures with the same name? ....

That is a very valid point. And in fact there are many
hundreds of these, but most are exact copies. It would
probably be easier to use the largest image database
(en.wikipedia's images and other media files) as a
base, add then add all the others. For name conflicts
we could ignore anything that is exactly the same size
and use the en.wikipedia version (since it is probably
exactly the same photo). All other name conflicts will
have to be fixed manually. We have already had to do
similar manual work when we disallowed external image
display on en.wikipedia. That wasn't too painful or
time-consuming.

>The same goes for logins.

Most of the duplicate logins will either be from the
same person or from a person who is no longer active
(most of whom just created the account and never made
more than 10 edits). We can make the job easier by
auto-exiring all user accounts that have made fewer
than 10 edits after say 120 days of inactivity. That
should clear many thousands of user names and thus
prevent many conflicts. We could even have a 100 edit
/ one year auto-expiration to clear out even more user
names.

>And why would merging logins fix the problem of
>people not going to the right wiki?

I didn't claim that. But it would reduce the threshold
needed to participate as a logged-in user across
wikis. Not having to deal with separate logins would
tend to encourage more cross-wiki work.

Oh, and the name should not preclude non-image files.
files.wikimedia.org or the slightly odd but more sexy
multimedia.wikimedia.org would work better.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Esperanto Wikipedia slow too

body:
> > Broundground for my question is: at certain times
> de.wikipedia is
> > terribly overloaded (or unresponsive) and I'd like
> to know the reason
> > why.
>
> Today the same again.  Is the the time when google
> fetches the whole
> thing?  I cannot access the German WP for more than
> 13' - accessing the
> English version works, more or less instantly.

I've had people reporting to me the same about the
Esperanto version (Esperanto runs slow, English runs
fast), but I haven't experienced it myself.

Chuck

=====
Learn a cool language for free!
http://www.lernu.net/

__________________________________________________________________

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Logos und Klingelt?ne f?rs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Big picture issues (was: cluster and images)

body:
Jimbo wrote:

>And images.wikimedia.org would be a project
>unto itself, so to speak, where images are
>collected (perhaps automatically) and copied
>from the other projects, and given neutral
>captions, and entered into a big image library.
>The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very
>strict, not relying on fair use.  All images
>would have to be public domain or GNU FDL or
>something compatible.

I like that idea! But just replace
"images.wikimedia.org" with either
"files.wikimedia.org" or "multimedia.wikimedia.org"
(since we want more than just images), and replace
"project" with "sub-project" (since its resources
would be used by all projects - like meta). This also
preserves the per wiki upload utility which would be
oddly disabled for Wikimedia projects under my plan
but would still be needed by non-Wikimedia projects
that use MediaWiki (thus there would be little
Wikimedia developer interest to maintain that
functionality). But there would need to be a prominent
mention and link to the multimedia file database on
every Wikimedia project's upload special page.
Something like "You can use this page to upload
multimedia files from your harddrive. But you may also
want to visit [our multimedia file database] to see if
a similar file is already there."

Then when the much-talked-about upload form is
enacted, the software could automatically copy
anything tagged as PD or under a free content license
to the Wikimedia database. Anything marked as "fair
use" or "special permission" would just reside on the
wiki's own upload space.

>And then if people needed an image for something,
>they could just copy it from there.

Why copy when you can export! :) There could be an
"Export this <filetype> to the [<language>]
[<Wikimedia project>]" as <file name>.<ext>" (it would
also be neat if it showed everywhere in Wikimedialand
where it is being used). Oh and anything exported to a
different file name should not create a copy of the
same file at the Wikimedia file database under a
different name. Category tags can also be used here as
well (that would help with searching).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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body:
Opps! Last post was to wrong list. Sorry.

Jimbo wrote:

>And images.wikimedia.org would be a project
>unto itself, so to speak, where images are
>collected (perhaps automatically) and copied
>from the other projects, and given neutral
>captions, and entered into a big image library.
>The rules for inclusion in *this* would be very
>strict, not relying on fair use.  All images
>would have to be public domain or GNU FDL or
>something compatible.

I like that idea! But just replace
"images.wikimedia.org" with either
"files.wikimedia.org" or "multimedia.wikimedia.org"
(since we want more than just images), and replace
"project" with "sub-project" (since its resources
would be used by all projects - like meta). This also
preserves the per wiki upload utility which would be
oddly disabled for Wikimedia projects under my plan
but would still be needed by non-Wikimedia projects
that use MediaWiki (thus there would be little
Wikimedia developer interest to maintain that
functionality). But there would need to be a prominent
mention and link to the multimedia file database on
every Wikimedia project's upload special page.
Something like "You can use this page to upload
multimedia files from your harddrive. But you may also
want to visit [our multimedia file database] to see if
a similar file is already there."

Then when the much-talked-about upload form is
enacted, the software could automatically copy
anything tagged as PD or under a free content license
to the Wikimedia database. Anything marked as "fair
use" or "special permission" would just reside on the
wiki's own upload space.

>And then if people needed an image for something,
>they could just copy it from there.

Why copy when you can export! :) There could be an
"Export this <filetype> to the [<language>]
[<Wikimedia project>]" as <file name>.<ext>" (it would
also be neat if it showed everywhere in Wikimedialand
where it is being used). Oh and anything exported to a
different file name should not create a copy of the
same file at the Wikimedia file database under a
different name. Category tags can also be used here as
well (that would help with searching).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Please disregard "Big picture issues (was: cluster and
	images)"

body:
That was posted to the wrong list. Sorry. Respond to
Wikitech-l if so interested (actually the thread is
really more appropriate to wikimedia-l, but that list
does not exist yet).

--mav

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] 142.177 at his old tricks again

body:
Sigh. Another thinly veiled threat from our dear
friend 142.177.

http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Maveric149&diff=19973&oldid=19972

"Sadly, you didn't learn your lesson from your first
attempt at slander and censure.

There are very few things you will regret more in your
life than defending your little clique of friends
here, Daniel Mayer. What they are doing is wrong,
racist, illegal, immoral and stupid. You seemed to
realize this for a while, but, you have stepped back
in, so, you deserve what you get. This is very sad.
You seemed to have grown up. But obviously not."

"There are very few things you will regret more in
your life than defending your little clique of friends
here, Daniel Mayer." Sounds a lot like a mobster
telling a buisnessman that he will "regret" not doing
what the mobster wants. Sigh.

Sorry Craig Hubley (who lives in the Toranto area),
but the only regret is that I gave you some slack. The
hard ban will be enforced.

If my mentioning the real name of 142.177 was out of
line, then somebody delete this post.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing lists (was: cluster and images)

body:
It doesn't matter what address we use, but the mailing lists should NOT
be supported by the same server as the website. Because when the web
server goes down, then we can't talk to each other.

By the way, if Maveric wants to take on the heavy duties of
administering the mailing lists, we should probably accept his help.
He's got the personality and aptitude for it, and he's well liked.

(Grumpy Old) Uncle Ed Poor


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Allowing use of the Creative Commons license as
	an	option

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>As far as I understand "GFDL" is "viral" because it provides that any
>modifications, copies or any possible use can only result free documents
>(under the same license).
>
>So using CC would mean that the articles could be copied and used in closed
>documents, without giving anything back to community. I would not really
>like to spend my time for someone's unshared gains, you see (see cddb's
>story, etc.).
>
>
On the plus side (for those who share your viewpoint), this is pretty
much moot at this point, because we have nearly 300,000 articles under
the GFDL, from thousands of authors we would be unable to track down to
request permission for a license change, so a license change is simply
impossible without just starting over from scratch.

-Mark


subject:
[Wikitech-l] can I install wikimedia on a normal webspace
	account?	how?

body:
On Nov 3, 2003, at 14:52, Freerk Ohling wrote:
> Hello wikitech-l,
>
>       I am trying to install the mediawiki-20030829.tar.gz on my
>       webspace as a readonly mirror of the german cur database.
>       I already got it managed to insert the 92MB mysqldump
>       of the german cur_table into my mysql database.
>
>       But I can't install the mediawiki. I do have a webspace packet
>       with 200mb space, PHP 4.2.1, Apache 1.3.23 and MySQL
>       3.23.51-log on Linux 2.4.9-31 RedHat7.2. I also have phpMyAdmin
>       2.5.1 (but the mediawiki INSTALL file says: Recommended versions
>       are: Apache 1.3.27 or later; MySQL 4.0.13 or later; PHP 4.3.2 or
> later.)
-snip-

(If you haven't already, you may wish to sign up for the mediawiki-l
mailing list, we're hoping to split setup help and release
announcements off from the day-to-day running-of-Wikipedia and active
development stuff here in wikitech-l.)

You may have trouble with that old a PHP, some things may need to be
replaced with older equivalents.

It should be possible to set it up generally, but not with the install
script.

All the *.php files from includes/ and languages/ (or at least, just he
languages/ files you need) need to go into a single install directory,
for simplicity this may be the place where you put wiki.phtml and
LocalSettings.php.

To create the database... first, in phpMyAdmin rename the existing
'cur' table to something else, say 'cur2', for the meantime. Now, in
phpMyAdmin you should have the option to run a sequence of sql
commands. I forget if there's a script upload option or if you just
have to paste in, but take maintenance/tables.sql and
maintenance/indexes.sql and execute all the commands in them; this
creates the table layout.

Now, get rid of the newly created 'cur' table and rename 'cur2' back to
'cur'.

If everything's set up right, you now should be able to browse pages.
Some features won't work (whatlinkshere, recentchangeslinked, nothing
yet in recentchanges, search won't work) and without the link tables
it'll be slightly less efficient loading pages, as it has to check the
existence of every linked page individually. "In theory" if you put the
'maintenance' subdirectory in there, and you've got an
AdminSettings.php, you can run the maintenance/rebuild-all.php script.
It may be buggy and may not work at all, be warned, and you really
_really_ shouldn't leave the maintenance scripts web-accessible.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Obstacles to development (was Re: Need developers)

references:
<3FA1ACF9.9030802@hotmail.com> <bnu1gu$9fn$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<bnuveg$3mn$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> Not everyone has 20 years of programming experience. Many potential
> Wikipedia developers don't have that kind of skill level. That doesn't mean
> they don't have a useful contribution to make. And their skill will increase
> over time, as they work with us.

I couldn't agree more and was only trying to make a point about motives
for software development varying among experience groups.

IMO, actual technical skill in writing software, troubleshooting, and so
forth doesn't really increase much after the first three or four years
of experience.  At that point skill is determined more by aptitude,
environment knowledge and project-specific knowledge.  Ancillary skills
such as estimating, requirements analysis, teamwork, and the like do
however continue to accrue with time.

> As for financial incentives: let's just say opinions are divided. Maybe if
> Louis pushed it for long enough, and made a good enough case, it might
> happen. But I think there's a fairly large potential labour pool who will
> work for nothing (except for a bit of support).

The likelihood of anything happening at Wikipedia because "Louis pushed
it for long enough" is remote enough to be mirthsome.

One of the things that occured to me after I sent the post was that pay,
even if token, would allow volunteers to include their work for
Wikipedia on a resume or job application more credibly if they wished to
do so.

Louis


from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Public Library of Science GFDL Compatible

body:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 11:17:30AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 04:44:49AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote things.
> >
> >My only question is: are you a lawyer?
> >
> >If you are not, then it's just a guess.
> >
> A fallacy!  What makes the opinion of a lawyer more valid than a guess?

see [[Wikipedia:Legal advice]].

(I only suggest that guesses of law professionals are probably more based on
practice than guesses of laypersons like us.)

I'd prefer EFF and CC folks, but they probably have better to do than debate
this.

Peter


subject: [WikiEN-l] Craig Hubley

body:
I'm  not sure what the point of all this was, but anyhow for anyone who
doesn't understand what this is about, there is a longstanding theory
that '24' is Craig Hubley.  I'm less certain about '142'.

Nonetheless, I'd like to point out that Mr. Hubley's interesting
political theories are unrelated to his ban, which is on strictly
behavioral grounds.  Lots of people, and I include myself without
hesitation or reservation, believe all manner of things that the
majority might find ludicrous, but so long as they can work together
in a friendly and peaceful way, they are welcome here.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Allowing use of the Creative Commons license as an
	option

body:
On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 04:09:04AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:

> "gnunote" => "Unless some other copyright license such as one of the  href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/'>Creative Commons licenses
> has been selected by the original author of an article all text is
> available under the terms of the  href='http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=GNU_Free_Documentati
> on_License'>GNU Free Documentation License. Use of images may be
> restricted, check the description of the image for details.
[...]
> As to whether Wikipedia should make a similar change...

As far as I understand "GFDL" is "viral" because it provides that any
modifications, copies or any possible use can only result free documents
(under the same license).

So using CC would mean that the articles could be copied and used in closed
documents, without giving anything back to community. I would not really
like to spend my time for someone's unshared gains, you see (see cddb's
story, etc.).

I prefer being virally free.


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
> Using images.wikipedia.org I see one open issue: Login cookies are
> currently set to the full qualified hostname, e.g. en.wikipedia.org.
> The browser would not send the cookie to images.wiki[pm]edia.org.
>
> Should we create a unified user database for all wikimedia projects
> and set the cookie to *.wikipedia.org?

Why does this matter, though?  We don't do anything with images based on
somebody's user info, do we?

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


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
>Hybrid approaches are possible -- the webservers could NFS mount the
>/images/ directory from the db machine but only use the NFS
>mountpoints for writing -- for reads, we'd go through the reverse
>proxying mechanism.
>
>
>--Jimbo
>

Why not keep the master copies NFS mounted on the database machines,
_and_ local copies cached on the web server filesystems?

The same caching algorithm can be used for image files and rendered
pages, except that the "rendering" process for image files is a simple
copy from the master NFS server if the DB timestamp is more recent than
the local file timestamp. In this way, no web serving would need to
occur directly from the master.

In addition, running rsync periodically on the slaves to sync their
image directories with those of the master would have the effect of
keeping local copies up-to-date with very low overhead, and without
disturbing the caching algorithm described above.

This would also make switching to "disconnected mode" easy, if the
central DB / NFS server goes down.

-- Neil


from_name: Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]

subject: [WikiEN-l] Craig Hubley

body:
Craig Hubley lives in Toronto Canada. He is a founder of P146 -- a group which advocates regional secession from the Canadian national government; as well as from Toronto, Ontario, and the UN. He is a fan of the movie "Fight Club". He has a degree in mathematics, from the University of Toronto, Waterloo (1987).  He enjoys writing reviews for Amazon.com. He is associated with the Free University of Toronto, the Unicus Corporation, the Green Party, and Craig Hubley & Associates. He is a fan of Winona LaDuke.

It is easy enough, if you so desire, to search the internet and obtain his phone, fax, email, associates, friends, resume, education, personal correspondence, home address, and place of employment.

Notable Quotes by Mr. Hubley
  a.. But I have made up my mind whose side I fight on, and I would cut fifty human baby throats to save one gorilla.  In the 1960s there were "race traitors". I am a "species traitor". Take that as you will, but perhaps you see some reason now why I am not going to be participating in any great depth in any advice beyond the economy, which all Anthropoid nations participate in, whether willing to, or not...
  b.. The only real standard for money used by human beings for human concerns should be free time... I can buy a comfortable hour of being left alone by everyone to consume any non-material comfort that I want, for one US$. How's that? The government operates "don't bug me" isolation tanks for one dollar an hour to guarantee that price, and all of them have a cot and toilet and lots of Internet bandwidth... with programs set up to route people together who belong together.
  c..   In Canada our most educated observers have concluded that the PRovinces are pernicious instruments for exploiting natural capital as resources. Jane Jacobs, the noted urbanologist, advocates the city-state solution. We should be talking about how the NAFTA region, and then the OAS region, can develop workable investment and currency liquidity standards so that there is no "Rent-seeking" nor "race to the bottom" in either bloc.
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from_name: Andrew Alder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Banned user protection on the Meta?

body:
G'day

This message doesn't seem to have been saved on the archive properly, see

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-November/012902.html

It did go out to those subscribed to the full list (at least I got my copy)
but I don't know whether it was in the digest.

So I'm trying again. Apologies to those who now have two copies (assuming
it works this time).

Andrew A

>Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 05:10:42 +1100
>To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>From: Andrew Alder <andrewa at alder.ws>
>Subject: Banned user protection on the Meta?
>
>
>It appears that a hard-banned user from the English Wikipedia is now
>active on the Meta, see
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Contributions_by_142.177.xxx.xxx
>
>and
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump#Any_banned_user_protection_for_Meta?
>
>(sorry I can't make the second link work properly, Eudora doesn't want to
>include the '?' in the link).
>
>Any advice as to how to handle the Meta contributions would be
>appreciated. As I said in the Village Pump, there are some good points
>being made, just in the wrong place IMO. They are provocative and
>interesting, but IMO some of them don't belong in Wikipedia at all (even
>the Meta), and there's considerable risk of myself and others wasting time
>if we're not careful.
>
>This is my first post to any Wikipedia mailing list. It was suggested on
>the Pump that it should be raised on the English Wikipedia list, but it
>seems to me to better fit the guidelines for this one.
>
>Andrew Alder
>Wikipedian andrewa

****
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body:
> Let's say we have a picture on wikipedia, let's say
> it's a photo of an
> elephant at the San Diego zoo.  It's used on
> wikipedia as an
> illustration for the San Diego zoo article.
>
> I am writing my 3rd grade science textbook, and I
> link to that same
> picture.  In the text, I write about that picture.
> "As you can see
> from the photo, elephants love to throw dirt on
> their backs with their
> trunks."
>
> But later someone comes along and changes the photo
> in the San Diego
> zoo article.  It's still an elephant at the San
> Diego zoo, but a
> different one.  And no dirt is being thrown.

That's why I'd look at all of the articles linking to
a picture before changing it. I see no reason why your
argument doesn't mean that multiple pages within the
same wiki shouldn't be able to link to the same
picture.
>
> So, I think that when different articles or
> different books use the
> same images, they *each* need to make a local copy.
>
> So, for images, I think it makes a lot of sense to
> have
> images.wikipedia.org
> images.wikibooks.org
>
> and so on.
>
> The same problem exists for various languages, of
> course.
>
> I'm just saying that "available for use by any
> Wikimedia project"
> doesn't necessarily imply that the images need to be
> all put onto one
> big server.
>
> Actually, a very sensible thing to do, I should
> think, would be
> to eventually have images.wikipedia.org, for live
> images used
> on the encyclopedia, images.wikibooks.org, etc. but
> ALSO to have
> images.wikimedia.org.
>
> And images.wikimedia.org would be a project unto
> itself, so to speak,
> where images are collected (perhaps automatically)
> and copied from the
> other projects, and given neutral captions, and
> entered into a big
> image library.  The rules for inclusion in *this*
> would be very
> strict, not relying on fair use.  All images would
> have to be public
> domain or GNU FDL or something compatible.
>
> And then if people needed an image for something,
> they could just copy
> it from there.
>
> --Jimbo

That's a good idea for a project. I wonder if it would
need new software specially made for collecting an
image library, or if we'd just have normal wiki pages
for purposes such as categorization. In a collection
like that, it would make sense to have a policy
against uploading a picture that is completely
different from the one that was already there; it
should instead be uploaded to a new name. (but a
picture edited slightly to make it look better could
still be uploaded to the same name.) This could make
it so that anyone could link to it without having to
worry about the picture being replaced, and at the
same time have a more perminant image archive.

I have some other name ideas for the image collection:
clipart.wikimedia.org or wikiart.org. Would those be
good?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Craig Hubley

body:
My point wasn't so much to do with his personal beliefs; but rather, to point out that by stating his name on the wiki-en; mav has allowed me to know a great deal of information about Hubley, some of which Im sure he would rather not be so available.
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body:
On Nov 3, 2003, at 19:20, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Kurt wrote:
>> Indeed, this is really strange. Jimbo, how could this happen?
>
> Because whoever registered wikipedia.de didn't renew the registration.
> AFAIK
> wikipedia.de was never owned by nor ever an official Wikimedia domain
> name.
> So its fate was in the hands of whoever registered it.

Various people are under the impression that Jimbo owned it, which is
supported by a perusal of the list archives:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2002-June/000465.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Wikimedia already has a whole bunch of domain names that have to be paid for
>(and renewed). If we purchase wikipedia.de then to be fair then we would have
>to do for every other wikipedia.xx where xx corresponds to country code that
>is also a language code we use. That is a lot of domain names for Wikimedia
>to pay for.
>
>
I think it might be a good idea to buy it for at least the most active
Wikipedias, where there is press coverage happening.  Sure, to be fair
we should have it for all of them, but maybe the top 5-10 active
Wikipedias should be a higher priority, since that's where people are
most likely to get confused.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Craig Hubley

body:
Seeing as how Mr. Hubley on his web site takes credit for one of
142.177.etc's trademark articles, I believe there is every reason to
believe that Hubley and 142.177.etc are one and the same, unless there
is some evidence to the contrary.

However, I must take issue with the implied suggestion some have made
that we undertake to bombard Hubley with e-mail, phone calls, legal
threats, and personal visits.  Such a response would be ineffective and
inconsistent with our core values.  In particular, it would be our
misfortune to believe that we hold some sort of trump card which we can
play to win the trick, as nothing could be further from the truth.  Our
strength is in numbers and cumulative tenacity.  Revert and delete as
necessary.  Carry on.

Louis Kyu Won Ryu

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I'm  not sure what the point of all this was, but anyhow for anyone who
> doesn't understand what this is about, there is a longstanding theory
> that '24' is Craig Hubley.  I'm less certain about '142'.
>
> Nonetheless, I'd like to point out that Mr. Hubley's interesting
> political theories are unrelated to his ban, which is on strictly
> behavioral grounds.  Lots of people, and I include myself without
> hesitation or reservation, believe all manner of things that the
> majority might find ludicrous, but so long as they can work together
> in a friendly and peaceful way, they are welcome here.
>
>
> --Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: RK

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I'm at wits end with RK.
>

I support Mav and can sympathize with his frustration.  RK is continuing
to make Wikipedia an unfriendly place and his behavior is the antithesis
of the collegial example to which we aspire.  I believe that it is time
to set limits, and suggest that it is time for Jimbo to intervene.

Louis


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] RK

body:
Ban
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] Big picture issues

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Most of the duplicate logins will either be from the
>same person or from a person who is no longer active
>(most of whom just created the account and never made
>more than 10 edits). We can make the job easier by
>auto-exiring all user accounts that have made fewer
>than 10 edits after say 120 days of inactivity. That
>should clear many thousands of user names and thus
>prevent many conflicts. We could even have a 100 edit
>/ one year auto-expiration to clear out even more user
>names.
>
I very much support the idea of being able to have one login apply
across the whole, but there is a proble with any kind of auto-expiry.
 The user name list includes unacceptable user names.  These may no
longer actively used, and as long as they are on the list nobody can use
them.  Conflicting user names will probably need to be resolved manually.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Craig Hubley

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
>
>>Such a response would be ineffective and  inconsistent
>>with our core values.
>
> I agree. But we can and should use that information to contact the authorities
> if Mr. Hubley's actions justify that.

I think we agree.  As I have pointed out before, the various
"authorities," such as they are, are unlikely to take much of an
interest in the situation as it stands presently.  Even when discussing
the matter with an ISP, it is a difficult case to make that anyone in
the world can edit Wikipedia, with no security limitations to speak of,
except for Hubley and a relative handful of others.  In olden times that
story would have held up, but today's ISPs will take action against
their own customers only in a few well-defined cases.  With Michael we
have a leg up because there is clear vandalism and a demonstrable intent
to disrupt.  142's situation is, to an ISP unfamiliar with Wikipedia,
more of a posting content dispute, in which they are unlikely to
intervene.  And as I have pointed out before, the supposed threats,
libel, slander, and so forth just don't rise to the level that law
enforcement consider actionable (IANAL).  Oh sure, one of us could bring
our own action at our own expense, but for what?  At best you get a
restraining order, and someone with a strong technical skill set and
years of internet experience will cover their tracks, if motivated
enough.  Better to revert, delete, forget, move on.  SoftSecurity
carries the day.

Louis


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] cluster and images

body:
On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 09:51:07AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Jason Richey wrote:
> > Why not just serve the images from images.wikipedia.org (which I
> > imagine would resolve to the database machine for the moment).  Am I
> > missing some key point that makes something fancier necessary?
>
> My inherent love for complexity?  ;-)
>
> Hmmm, well, let me think.  A fancy-enough reverse proxying system
> could cache images on the frontend machine so that we only have to
> bother the database machine for write and occassional reads, whereas
> serving all the images directly from the db machine is going to be a
> fair amount of traffic.
>
> On the other hand, since images are always going to be different from
> article data in some important ways, then *whatever* we do, a switch
> to images.wikipedia.org is probably a very good idea.
>

Using images.wikipedia.org I see one open issue: Login cookies are
currently set to the full qualified hostname, e.g. en.wikipedia.org.
The browser would not send the cookie to images.wiki[pm]edia.org.

Should we create a unified user database for all wikimedia projects
and set the cookie to *.wikipedia.org?

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] RK

body:
From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>

I'm at wits end with RK.

Just check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Gaia_philosophy&action=history

Note RK's edit summaries (first is reverting me,
second is reverting Cimon avaro, and third is
reverting Anthere):

RK (Reverting violation of standard Wikipedia
protocol. Please stop the personal attacks, and stop
attacking statements I NEVER MADE. Take the time to
READ the actual comments.)

RK (Cimon, please stop your mass reversions, your lies
about my own statements, and stop attacking things I
have never said. You need to get some sort of control
over your anger.)

and

RK (Reverting Anthere;'s POV violations, again. This
is the English Wikipedia, and not Anthere's personal
wish list of she wishes English speakers would use
this term. Please ban that vandal. Seriously.)

%%%%%%

Ant :

Mav, I apology in advance, but I fear that part of
what you wrote is misrepresentation :-(

Unless I seriously missed something, the comment RK
made just above is a rather old one. Err...RK and I
apparently disagree about something on this article
(though I have not been able to distinguish what
precisely yet), but he has not recently told me I was
out of place on en, nor asked for me to be banned for
being a vandal. That is old stuff.
Err...he *suggested* that part of what I wrote a
couple of days ago could be interpretated as
anti-semitism, but it was rather "gently" said (so to
speak). Right now (toward me at least), I see someone
trying to make efforts.

%%%%%%%%

So according to RK, my restoration of a great deal of
text was a violation of Wikipedia protocol and I
attacked him. I did no such thing (I did mention
that /he/ was the one doing the attacking though).
Also according to RK Cimo avaro is a liar and has an
anger management problem. Sorry, but I just don't see
that. What I /do/ see is RK going ballistic on a daily
basis on a number of articles. Finally according to RK
Anthere writes POV text and is a vandal.
That is an outrageous assertion.

I hate to say it, but I think RK is more of a
hindrance to our effort than his edits are worth.

%%%%%%%%%

Ant :
again, he did not write recently I was a vandal. I am
not sure about the pov, but I think he did not either.
I thank you for thinking that outrageous assertion (I
think I will be an expert in npov writing for all cult
articles in a few months). It was very nice of you
Mav. All the other refs you gave are exact, and I
agree it is difficult. Err...very difficult. Like
walking on eggs.

I am not able to give an opinion on whether this
difficulty is worth or not worth it :-( I dunno really
:-(

I thank 168 for her help.

Ant

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