subject: Great place to run a wiki (was: [WikiEN-l] issues)

body:
As the mailing list admin, I take issue with the charge that "The
mailing list is a terrible place to run a wiki." In my nearly three
years as a Wikipedian, I have found rather that mailing list discussions
tend to be _more_ fruitful than the website talk pages. There are
several reasons for this.

1. Only people who really care a lot about Wikipedia subscribe to the
list. So you get the key players' attention.

2. Discussions cannot get fragmented onto several different and shifting
talk pages. So you _keep_ the key player's attention.

3. Mailing list posts cannot be retracted or altered; they are a
permanent, easily referenced record.

4. There is stricter attention paid to the "no personal remarks" rule
here, so discussions don't descend to the "you're a poopyhead" stage as
quickly as on talk pages. So the discussion stays on topic.

5. Jimbo reads the mailing list. ('nuff said)

6. Finally, we do it because it works. It's a self-perpetuating
tradition, and all major issues have been resolved (or at least first
floated) here.

We've tried to run the wiki on the wiki itself, for routine matters, but
when that breaks down we need a "court of last resort".

Ed Poor
English Wikipedia Mailing List Admin


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions

body:
"Part of the problem is that quite a few people (Anthony is certainly not
the only one - others have been debated here on the list as well) seem
to feel perfectly justified in violating the 3-revert guideline."

The 3-revert guideline is not very useful when a group of people gang up
against another and refuse to discuss their point of view.  The closest I
got to an explanation was "REVERT - YOU DO NOT CHANGE THE FEATURED ARTICLE.
PERIOD. User:Raul654 changes the featured article. NOT User:Anthony
DiPierro."  While we're discussing violation of the 3-revert guideline,
let's also discuss violation of the guidelines on use of the rollback
button, which is meant for reverting anonymous vandals.  I was neither
anonymous nor a vandal, yet the first and majority of the reverts of my
contribution were made using the rollback button.  Let's talk about
violation of the page protection guidelines.  Raul is not only reverting
without explanation, he's reverting without violation and then protecting
the page.  Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored,
such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.

Then, when we're done talking about all that, let's look at the hypocrisy
that is going on here.  We call ourselves a free encyclopedia, yet edit wars
are fought and people are blocked so that we can feature non-free images on
the front page.  Our page explaining administrators says that sysops "are
not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody else in
terms of editorial responsibility" yet failure to obey orders made by
administrators results in blocks and bans.  We talk about consensus all over
the place, but all we do is vote.  The viewpoints of the minority are
virtually never taken into consideration.  Why should 3 people compromise
against 2 when 9 reverts is more than 6?

So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on
Wikipedia:revert.  You have to ignore some of the guidelines, or you
wouldn't get anything done at all.  There's even a rule telling people to
ignore all rules, complete with Jimbo's signature on it.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[Wikitech-l] List of things that need to be done
	developer-wise on the Icelandic Wikipedia

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 07:40:53 +0200, Jens Frank <jeluf at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 05:11:53AM +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> > 1. Insert the LanguageIs.php
> > Thanks a lot for previous help on this file, it's already in CVS and
> > ready to roll;=)
> >
> > 2. Post-LanguageIs.php insertation
> >
> > After namespaces have been translated to Icelandic we'll have a lot of
> > broken wikilinks, [[Category:foo]] instead of [[Flokkur:foo]] and so
> > on, i understand that instead of falling over gracefully the system
> > will break due to this,
>
> No, it won't break any more. It used to in the past, but the current
> version of the script accepts the English names and automatically
> redirects to the local name. Try for example
>
>         http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:URV
>
Nice, would still be nice to have some kind of bot but it wont be an
imporant issue like i thought it would be.

> > 3. Make Wikilinks work correctly,
> > Currently, if i write wikilinks on is. they will not behave in the
> > correct way, [[a]]b will only make a href="" for a but not b, see
> > http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandkassinn for a demo of this,
> > could all letters listed in the Icelandic alphabet at
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_alphabet be put in some sort of
> > list for allowed characters to expand on?
> >
>
> This list is at MediaWiki:Linktrail. The format is a regular expression,
> see the setting for the German wikipedia for how to do this:
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Linktrail
>
Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a charm

> Regards,
>
> JeLuF
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

Now the only thing is just to drop in the languageIs.php file and it
will work like a charm, thanks alot for your advice and input


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: more questions

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>While we're discussing violation of the 3-revert guideline,
>let's also discuss violation of the guidelines on use of the rollback
>button, which is meant for reverting anonymous vandals.  I was neither
>anonymous nor a vandal, yet the first and majority of the reverts of my
>contribution were made using the rollback button.
>
It's meant for vandalism of any kind, anonymous or no. And yes, I agree
that according to our policies, this situation should not be handled
with the rollback button, which is why I brought up the point in the
first place.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Philip Newton

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Compare selected versions javascript

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:10:09 -0400, Creative Chemistry
<orders at creativechemistry.net> wrote:

> not to be evil, but how about this... a javascript that automatically
> disables the other checkboxes when 2 or more are checked... not
> siappears them, but merely grays them out??

If they are disabled, then it's impossible to correct a mistake if you
chose the wrong two versions - you'd have to reload the page.

Similarly if you hit the Back button and return - the two radio buttons
(not checkboxes, currently) will still be selected and so the others are
disabled and you can't choose any others. Not good IMO.

Cheers,
Philip


from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
[Wikitech-l] List of things that need to be done developer-wise
	on the Icelandic Wikipedia

body:
On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 05:11:53AM +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> 1. Insert the LanguageIs.php
> Thanks a lot for previous help on this file, it's already in CVS and
> ready to roll;=)
>
> 2. Post-LanguageIs.php insertation
>
> After namespaces have been translated to Icelandic we'll have a lot of
> broken wikilinks, [[Category:foo]] instead of [[Flokkur:foo]] and so
> on, i understand that instead of falling over gracefully the system
> will break due to this,

No, it won't break any more. It used to in the past, but the current
version of the script accepts the English names and automatically
redirects to the local name. Try for example

	http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:URV

> 3. Make Wikilinks work correctly,
> Currently, if i write wikilinks on is. they will not behave in the
> correct way, [[a]]b will only make a href="" for a but not b, see
> http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandkassinn for a demo of this,
> could all letters listed in the Icelandic alphabet at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_alphabet be put in some sort of
> list for allowed characters to expand on?
>

This list is at MediaWiki:Linktrail. The format is a regular expression,
see the setting for the German wikipedia for how to do this:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Linktrail

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Czech wikipedia: how to ban users?

body:
On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 03:44:42AM +0100, Arwel Parry wrote:
> In message <8b722b80040720143078f3360e at mail.gmail.com>, Angela_
> <beesley at gmail.com> writes
> >If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
> >can request it at
> >http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers
> >
> >Angela.
>
> Oh great, another Meta page that most people won't know exists! :(
>
> Please excuse my cynicism, Angela, but I am in despair to see that the
> top two links off that page are [[Meta:Language files to be updated]]
> and [[Meta:Requests for languageXX.php update ]], when I have in the
> last week or so posted both here and on Wiki-en asking whether anybody
> actually monitors those pages and perhaps even occasionally actions
> requests on those particular pages since there are currently outstanding
> update requests going back many months, and only got a reply saying that
> the MediaWiki strings have largely superseded the language files. Yes, I
> KNOW that, but there are still things which can only be tweaked using
> the language file.
>
> I've had a request for an update to LanguageCy.php for over two weeks
> now, because we've got a mis-spelling in the name for "July".

Hi Arwel,

the problem with the LanguageXX.php pages on meta is that they are
maintained by people who act in good faith, but are not involved in
the development processes. LanguageCy.php for example is based on
revision 1.12. That is a revision from the current "development" branch,
not from the "stable" branch wikipedia.org is based on. If I apply that
file to the site, lots of things would be broken. Now I have to try to
get the diffs from the file to find out what has changed. History is only
of limited help since it contains both your changes to the content and
your changes caused by the script changes in CVS.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:
> In message <8b722b80040720143078f3360e at mail.gmail.com>, Angela_
> <beesley at gmail.com> writes
>
>> If any of the other wikis would like username blocking enabled, they
>> can request it at
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-development_tasks_for_developers
>>
>> Angela.
>
> Oh great, another Meta page that most people won't know exists! :(
>
> Please excuse my cynicism, Angela, but I am in despair to see that the
> top two links off that page are [[Meta:Language files to be updated]]
> and [[Meta:Requests for languageXX.php update ]], when I have in the
> last week or so posted both here and on Wiki-en asking whether anybody
> actually monitors those pages and perhaps even occasionally actions
> requests on those particular pages since there are currently outstanding
> update requests going back many months, and only got a reply saying that
> the MediaWiki strings have largely superseded the language files. Yes, I
> KNOW that, but there are still things which can only be tweaked using
> the language file.
>
> I've had a request for an update to LanguageCy.php for over two weeks
> now, because we've got a mis-spelling in the name for "July". I realise
> we can't expect the developers to drop everything but the present total
> silence gives us no indication that anyone has even noticed our request,
> let alone give us an indication of when it might possibly be done. In
> the last half hour I've written a reply to a complaint on
> [[cy:Wicipedia:Y Caffi]] from a user who was complaining that while the
> Welsh word for redirect, ail-cyfeirio, works, when an article is moved
> the system puts "redirect" in the article, which no longer works because
> the current version of the language file doesn't have the English
> synonym in it; the version I've asked to be applied does. I said it
> should be fixed soon -- am I to be shown up as a liar?
>
> I'm sorry, but from my seat on the sidelines of this mailing list I get
> the impression that the developers are more interested in writing
> version 4 of MediaWiki than in getting version 3 to work properly in all
> languages.

Hello Arwel,

The best notification will be to send a mail here then reach irc
(server: irc.freenode.net channel: #mediawiki) and notif devs here and
make sure someone looks at the bug / feature.

As for the meta pages, I personally find meta a big and unorganised mess
(although it tends to be a lot better than 2 years ago). I personally
rarely monitor pages there.

As for developpers focuses, most of us are also admins of the wikimedia
server farm and that kept most of us really busy to get the site working
correctly. Also it's holliday time, I personally prefer spending
sometime outside than sitting in front of my computer trying to fix
misterious langages.

Finally, before we start the development of the 1.4 serie with some
major new features (parser / new db shema ..) we have some things to
complete like xml import, installer fixing, langages updates.

Maybe we can start making a weekly newsletter of what's happening in cvs
  :o)

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
About shipping have you considered DHL or FedEX, they have a pretty
reliable global network.

----- Original Message -----
From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 01:15:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation
To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
Cc: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org

Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware
donation made to Wikimedia Foundation-------------An employee at HP in
France has contacted us, offering us free hardware. This is a
no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who
want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.

The machines offered are:
* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM
* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM
* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which
might work as a web server box immediately)
* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.There were a lot of
discussion on irc these days about these servers
and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.
First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked
up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the
servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.Med will
install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will
pay for this).

Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for
free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)The three bigger servers will be
shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap
shipping cost.
Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most we
 lcome.
 We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be
able to find a good price.
Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution. -----------I
will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing
corporations helping Wikimedia projects.

		________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?

Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!


subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
http://www.dhl.fr/ - DHL France
http://www.fedex.com/fr/ - FedEx France in French
http://www.fedex.com/fr_english/ - FedEx France in English

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 08:32:38 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> About shipping have you considered DHL or FedEX, they have a pretty
> reliable global network.
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 01:15:03 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation
> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> Cc: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
> Though it is not entirely fixed, here are some news of a hardware
> donation made to Wikimedia Foundation-------------An employee at HP in
> France has contacted us, offering us free hardware. This is a
> no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who
> want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.
>
> The machines offered are:
> * One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM
> * One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM
> * One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which
> might work as a web server box immediately)
> * 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.There were a lot of
> discussion on irc these days about these servers
> and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.
> First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked
> up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
> There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the
> servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.Med will
> install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will
> pay for this).
>
> Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for
> free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)The three bigger servers will be
> shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap
> shipping cost.
> Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most we
>  lcome.
>  We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
> but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be
> able to find a good price.
> Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution. -----------I
> will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing
> corporations helping Wikimedia projects.
>
>                 ________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
>
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
>


from_name: Matt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Serious WinXP Install Problem (Monobook breaks)

body:
Hello List, especialy Tim. I finally decided to try this list.
Since we're deep into mediawiki, I'll need it.

I am trying to run MediaWiki 1.3beta on my WinXP platform. 1.26 ran fine
in all skins. But in 1.3, everything runs, but monobook is badly broken,
almost like only parts of the CSS are being trashed.  Some of the CSS
structure reads, but much does not.  So for example, the tabs will look
fine, but the body fonts are lost completely, as are most margins, etc.
The style paths are the same as the install set, AND the same as 1.26,
so that isn't the problem.  I've spend hours trying to figure it out,
and installed many times. No fix. Here is my recent log with a
sourceforge member.

Any tips greatly appreciated!

MediaWiki is a wonderful project. We're having a grand time with it, but
on the live server. I just want to get it running on my local machine.

Thanks!

I am running ver 1.3. monobook on winxP/apache php 4.3.4

In all browsers, the tabs render ok, but nothing else
does. The layout is completely broken. Earlier versions
worked fine.

Symptoms:
 >> Main Page starting flush left in the quickbar
region. (see attached screen shot

 >>Font reads as Times on WinXP platform, and
Arial/sans-serif on my live linux host.

 >> when I orginally tried the install script, it
failed. Each click on "Setup your Wiki" link simply
added the /config dir to the address path. I then
accessed config/index.php directly and it was fine.
Could something have been fubared by this? Not likely.

The ONLY Apache error is :
[error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist:
C:/htdocs/favicon.ico

-- Install was vanilla.
-- Globals are registered in php.ini.

Localsettings.php all looks normal

Help! Unusable this way. I see no similar reports
anywhere, and yet my setup is pretty generic so I'm
assuming there's a bug somewhere.

Date: 2004-07-20 17:33
Sender: imsop
Logged In: YES
user_id=1053535

Sounds to me like at least part of your problem is your
*apache* config - the clue being that it didn't find the
/index.php by itself. That's a fairly cosmetic setting (you
have to add "index.php" on the end of the "DirectoryIndex"
line) but there may be others tripping you up more
seriously. Have you got anything else [fairly complex]
working successfully on this server?

It's not immediately obvious what could be wrong, but things
like Apache reporting the wrong "Content-type:" for CSS
files might be able to have catastrophic effects like this.
It's a pretty odd and major bug otherwise, isn't it!?

Date: 2004-07-20 22:13
Sender: matted

Thank for responding. I was losing hope. We are doing all
our development on our live server, and that's awkward. I'd
like to have my winXP machine running mediawiki.

My Apache confiq is this thisaway... so I presume that isn't
the problem.
	DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

This is so bizarre. At first I thought that the style sheets
weren't being referenced.. but they are. But most of the
rules are being clobbered... but only in monobook (the only
style we are using).  Standard and CologneBlue run just
fine. Any other ideas? I am just completely befuddled. I
love this product, and we are coding up a storm with it, but
I need to get it to run on my local machine.

Can you please tell me where most of the active developers
can be found for forward looking issues? Are the email lists
the only option, or are their active forums somewhere?

Sender: imsop

That is indeed thoroughly bizarre. Have you tried things
like reading the Apache *access* log after making a request,
to see if the browser asked for all the things you would
expect it to need and making some fake GET requests (using
libwww-perl or something) to see if there's anything funny
about the responses? Not that I can think what you'd be
looking for, but...

Also, there's not some way that something firewall-ish could
be limiting the flow of data/number of connections from the
webserver is there?

As for how to get in touch, there is indeed a live channel:
#mediawiki on irc.freenode.net; there's also the mailing
lists, which it sounds like you found already, the most
relevant to you being
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Good luck!


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anthony and the Main Page edit war

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:43:46 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> > Anthony is doing this just because he can
> Sounded to me more like he's doing it because he's against fair use images.

Seems like both, really.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 12, Issue 24

body:
To anyone interested: TomeRaider 3 beta is out.  It has native image,
html, and category support.

I recently used user:Erik Zachte's conversion script and the text-only
database for Wikipedia is weighing in ~300MB, so including pictures in
the future may only be feasible for the wealthier of us (not me!)  :)
They are also touting improved compression so that may help with this.
Also - any speculation as to how small (filesize wise) we could get
pictures considered necessary down to, defaulting the width to say,
100px?

I personally found my way to Wikipedia when looking for an
encyclopedia for my PDA, so this could be an important feature to
think about.

/Brian (Alterego)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database
http://members.ams.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia
http://www.tomeraider.com/tomeraider3.html


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
On Tuesday 20 July 2004 17:17, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Being forced to speak differently because of your gender, age, social
> class or race is a form of apartheid that keeps people in difference,
> where they should be equals.  The simplicity of English is a radical
> challenge to many other languages and cultures.

If only they'd want to view it as such...


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV is not personal original research

body:
I don't understand Fred Bauder personal attacks on me or
his bizzare logic.

Fred Bauder quotes from Israel Shahak's obituary in the
Guardian, and claims that this "puts the lie to your false
accusations, Robert.

I read the quote he included, and nothing in it denied that
quotes from Israel Shahak's book; nothing it denied the
existence of the point of view of the Anti-Defamation
League, and nothing in it denied the existence of the point
of view of most Jews.

I honestly don't know what Fred imagines he sees there, but
the words he quotes have nothing to do with what I was
talking about.

A few people here still misunderstand what NPOV means. Zero
and Fred think that they can do their own original research
on a person, and present their own personal conclusions as
"NPOV" facts. Sorry, but that is not how it works.  Rather,
in our encyclopedia we give the view of a person
(especially on the subjects they are most well known for).
We also give opposing points of view, and allow these other
POVs equal weight.

Fred seems to have read these two sentences in an obituary,
read nothing else, and then decided for himself that this
somehow neutralizes the points of view of all other people
and groups. That's not so. In fact, the text he quotes
didn't mention the issue of dispute at all.

The issue stands.

Robert

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] French hardware donation - technical choices made

body:
The French donation is a 4U 6CPU Pentium III-750 system with 2GB of RAM and three or four 9GB SCSI drives in a RAID setup; and three 1U Celerons. 2GB for the 4U because it comes with one but the donor is upgrading it to two for us. The other equipment mentioned was for us to consider and the donor would then allocate it among all of the projects which were competing for it. We didn't get it all.

On the technical side, it was decided that the Celerons just aren't suitable for the US site because the US Squids require roughly comparable specifications and the Celerons aren't really fast enough to be page builders, given the shipping costs to get them to the US. So, European Squid caches is the role they best fit. They will need a fairly cheap RAM upgrade to be Squids. These squids will speed things up for those in France and possibly more of Europe who are not logged in, by avoiding the sometimes slow or broken transatlantic links, and for everyone by taking some of the load from the US-based Squids.

The 4U 6CPU is best for the US side. That's the main page building site and putting it there will help everyone who's logged in or getting a non-cached page. Because peak load times are different in different parts of the world, the same amount of resources for the central site delivers more benefit than dedicating them to any one place. Also, the lag from locking and unlocking the database records across a slow link (the internet instead of a LAN) would hurt performance for everyone, by keeping locks for longer than necessary.

The donor requested that the celerons be named chloe, bleuenn and ennael. That seems like a reasonable request to accept, since we don't yet have a naming convention for remote or donated equipment. I doubt that a corporate donor would want their name associated with problem reports, so I expect that we could discourage corporate names if we wanted to.


from_name: tic at tictric.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Am Wed, 21 Jul 2004 08:32:38 +0000 hat ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> geschrieben:

> About shipping have you considered DHL or FedEX, they have a pretty
> reliable global network.
>

DHL might even be willing to "donate" the shipping? ;)

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 01:15:03 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation
> To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> Cc: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org

> Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for
> free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)The three bigger servers will be
> shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap
> shipping cost.
> Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most we
>  lcome.
>  We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
> but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be
> able to find a good price.
> Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution. -----------I
> will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing
> corporations helping Wikimedia projects.
>
>
> 		________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
>
> Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: foundation-l Digest, Vol 4, Issue 17

body:
Anthere,

I am stationed in Naples, Italy on a US Navy base.  I just ran over to
our post office (USPS) and here are the shipping options to a standard
address in Florida:

1) Maximum length + girth = 108 inches. Weight 70 pounds. If sent via
Space Available price will be $25.43

2) Maximum length + girth = 130 inches.  Weight 70 pounds.  If sent
normally $65.34 (this is considered oversize)

3) #2 + priority, $67.15

My base has a standard italian address available (we are connected to
the international airport here) for possible shipping from France to
here, so those prices would need to be checked (they SHOULD be minimal
as well).  I am also willing to pick up the USPS shipping charges as
they are minimal (including insurance).

But, these servers could be huge =) Do you have the dimensions?

Brian


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: List of things that need to be done
	developer-wise on the Icelandic Wikipedia

body:
Timwi wrote:
> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a charm
>
>
> I'm not sure, but this looks like it would also expand on the | character.
>
> You want just: /^([??????????a-z]+)(.*)$/sD

That won't work with UTF-8.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
> However I am really complaining that his actions, by and large, have
> succeeded. If he hadn't have behaved like that then
> [[Wikipedia:Tomorrow's featured article]] wouldn't exist right now.

Well, is that really true?  There were plenty of other paths for that
to exist, including working through the normal and proper channels.
It would have been easy for him to post a proper complaint about the
delay in doing that (or whatever) to this mailing list, or if he felt
that anyone in particular was being bad, he could have written to me
personally for support, and we could have made it a priority.

> after the fact - doing nothing to change the policy in a sort of "we
> don't negotiate with vandals" style seems to be cutting off our nose to
> spite our face.

That's right, it would be silly for us to say "Well, X is a good idea,
but the person who proposed it was behaving badly, so we refuse to do
it."

This is really a broader problem than just this type of case.  We want
people to work *together*, not *adversarially* to bring about positive
change.  We have to seek always to undercut the "red faction" type of
premise that civil disobedience to the fascist powers-that-be at
wikipedia (ha ha) is the only way to get things done.

--Jimbo


body:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> Anthony is doing this just because he can, because Wikipedia has no
> guidelines against users who are out to disrupt things.

Actually, of course, we have huge volumes of guidelines, all carefully
discussed and debated, and we have institutional mechanisms set up to
deal with such things, right?

What do you mean when we say we have "no guidelines against users who
are out to disrupt things"?

> Futhermore, I don't particularly like the suggestion that his actions
> motivated policy.

Me, too.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Anthere wrote:

>An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.
>
>This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.
>
>The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.
>
>There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
>and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.
>
>
>The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
>Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
>but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
>Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.
>
>-----------
>
>I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.
>
Before things are shipped across the ocean, has there been any
consideration of the effects arising from having machines designed to
work off the European power grid put into the North American power
grid.  The supply voltage issue can probably be overcome with
transformers, but a differnce in the cycling of alternating current
rates (60 cycles per second in North America) could make them useless.
Will they even work with the same monitors as are otherwise used in
North America?

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: issues

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> What's really appalling is that in many instances, not even the talk
> page of the disputed article is being used. The only communication going
> on is through edit summaries, and since those typically consist of "rv",
> accusations of vandalism, snide remarks, or the pre-filled edit summary
> from an admin using the rollback button, it's worse than useless.

I fully endorse this paragraph.

I'd rather see people fighting dirty on the talk pages than a revert
war.  At least in a case like that, there is a glimmer of hope for
communication.

But of course, I would rather see people not fighting dirty at all,
but rather seeking to influence others through kindness, reason, and
patience.

--Jimbo


body:
These prices are much more in tune with what I would have expected.
So far the cheapest quote I have personally seen from France is
roughly 500 Euros.

If there's some kind of huge discount for using USPS from a U.S.
military base, we should pursue that.

But there's something that puzzles me.  We have Evian water available
here for a normal price, brought from France.  So really, there has to
be some cheaper shipping method available.

Brian, just speaking hypothetically, suppose we found that it's
cheaper to send it to Germany first, and have a German go to a
military base there and mail it.  Is that possible?  Or is the USPS
only open to people with some official business there?

--Jimbo


from_name: Philippe Elie

subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 at 01:15 +0000, Anthere wrote:

> The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.
>
> There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
> and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.

There was some confusion about the given HW:

 3 * 1U (celeron 600, 20G IDE, 128 RAM)
 1 * 4U (6xPIII 750, 2G Ram, 4*9G SCSI Raid)

Others box has been given to other projects.

phe


subject: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Foundation-l] HP Hardware donation


subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions

body:
blankfaze wrote:
> I realise that the "rules" naming [[User:Raul654]] as de facto
> administrator of the feature template aren't really written down
> anywhere, that they're moreso common knowledge (or so I thought)...
> And maybe that was a mistake from the beginning.  Maybe it was just
> asking for trouble.

Yes, in retrospect of course that is obvious.  And I don't think that
there is anyone, not even Raul654, who would argue that in the long
run, it makes sense to have a single person in charge of such an
important thing without any formal means of oversight, etc.

But, it was a convenience and a custom, and since there would of
course be universal consensus to move forward with a different scheme,
there was absolutely no reason to have an episode of civil
disobedience to change it.  There was no emergency.

--Jimbo


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: DNS for wikibooks.org broken

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Subdomains of wikibooks.org don't work, only wikibooks.org and
> www.wikibooks.org are available, but not e.g. en.wikibooks.org.

This is some sort of DNS caching problem. Jason changed the entries more
than 28 hours ago, and obviously it was working for me or else I
wouldn't have moved the site. Querying DNS via the root nameservers
gives an unambiguous correct result: zwinger as the primary
authoratative server, and gunther as the secondary. Please contact me if
  you experience this problem, I want to make sure it's not isolated
before I move the site back.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Dan Keshet

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mediators (re: [[Israel Shahak]]

body:
Hi,

Does the mediation committee still exist?  I know it hasn't been sitting for
that long, but there's a request on Wikipedia:Requests for mediation where
all three users have requested mediation (myself, RK, Zero).  I also left a
note on Wikipedia talk:Mediation committee.

RK is misrepresenting both myself and Zero, but I don't believe this is the
correct forum to discuss it.  However, if there is no prospect for
mediation, we will have to find a forum somewhere, because [[Israel
Shahak]] has been protected for a while and there is absolutely no sign
that the discourse around this article is becoming more civil, let alone
productive.

--Dan


body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> Yes, resource sharing is the most efficient scheme overall, but there
> are other reasons to consider splitting off the European Wikis onto
> their own dedicated hardware:
>
> 1) Politics/Psychology - Europeans might be more willing to donate if
> they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro
> servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means
> contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).

Although I do think that under the general heading
"Politics/Psychology" there is something to be said for European
hardware, I disagree with the way that you put it, in two major
respects:

a.  "contributions... going straight to the Euro servers, rather than
contributing to 'all' wikis" -- this is a mindset that I want to
strongly discourage, the mindset of nationalism or regionalism.  We
are a global project, and I don't want people to start thinking of
"our" wikipedia versus "their" wikipedia.

b. "which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than
anything else" -- if someone contributes to fr wikipedia, it is just
not true that because the servers are in America, this amounts to
contributing to en more than anything else.

What I would say is that it enhances the global nature of our mission
if some servers are in Europe (and Asia) *whenever technical matters
warrant it*.  But the project itself is not and must not become a
series of disconnected regional projects operating independently and
perhaps in conflict.

> 2) Design Flexibility - Having a completely separate setup on the
> other side of the pond would allow (at least in theory) two completely
> different configurations.  This could be useful for testing and
> comparing different architectures in the future.

But geographical remoteness is *less* flexible in this regard.  For
any N servers, we are more flexible with them in one location rather
than 2, because servers could be pulled or added to a test cluster
with a different architecture as we see fit.

> 3) Redundancy - What happens if Something Awful (tm) happens in
> Florida?  Although we have an army of volunteers making regular
> off-site backups of the DB, it would still be nice to have an
> already-up-and-running duplicate site in place.

Yes, it would be nice, to be sure, but there are a couple of things
to realize:

First, in terms of having redundancy, it makese sense to first look at
the most likely points of failure.  Since we are colocation in an
excellent professional facility with tons of redundancy, the chances
of the colo itself going down are very low.  I lie awake at nights
worrying about zwinger, not about the facility itself.

Second, it certainly "would be nice" to have a fully redundant
duplicate site somewhere, but the cost would be exorbitant compared to
the likelihood of ever needing it.

---

I fully support using these celerons as squids in Europe, because it
might have some tiny performance benefits, and because it doesn't lead
down a path of complexity, and because I think it is a nice political
gesture.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Server donation

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> These prices are much more in tune with what I would have expected.
> So far the cheapest quote I have personally seen from France is
> roughly 500 Euros.

Didn't we get a whole bunch of offers to mirror our content? I think this would
be a golden opportunity to set up European squids. That should help reduce load
on the Wikimedia server farm and shave some time off at least anon reads from
Europe. But if the plan is to gut these machines for parts, then I can
understand the need to ship them to Florida.

-- Daniel

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Server donation


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> > It would greatly speed up things for European users.

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:58:58 +0200, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:

> Can you provide any data indicating that the 20ms-lag between this
> Atlantic bath tub does represent any kind of bottleneck for the average
> European user?

Regardless of the connection, splitting off some of the European Wikis
onto their own hardware would mean better performance on the back-end,
which should improve things significantly.

Also, I think it might encourage more such donations if would-be
benefactors knew their contributions would directly improve the
situation for their local Wikis, rather than being effectively being
absorbed into the English Wiki (since it would see the lion's share of
any overall improvement to the cluster in Florida).

If, as Yann and Anthere have already mentioned, we can even get free
hosting in France for this hardware, this seems like a no-brainer to
me.  At worst, we could always ship the servers over to Florida at a
later date if things didn't work out.  We literally have nothing to
lose, here.

-Bill


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 01:15:03AM -0700, Anthere wrote:
> The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.
>
> There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers
> and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.
>
> First we decided to accept the offer :-) The 6 servers will be picked up 2 french contributors, Med and Cereal Killer on thursday.
> There will be a small shipping cost from Grenoble (the city where the servers come from) to Paris, which will be taken by the WMF.
>
> Med will install the Celerons. They will have a memory upgrade (the WMF will pay for this).
>
> Yann has found us a hosting company ready to host the three squids for free, http://lost-oasis.fr/ :-)
>
> The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost.
> Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials,
> but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price.
> Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.

Why won't we take advantage of the opportunity and place the servers somewhere in Europe ?
It would greatly speed up things for European users.


subject: [Foundation-l] Server donation

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Didn't we get a whole bunch of offers to mirror our content? I think
> this would be a golden opportunity to set up European squids. That
> should help reduce load on the Wikimedia server farm and shave some
> time off at least anon reads from Europe. But if the plan is to gut
> these machines for parts, then I can understand the need to ship
> them to Florida.

:-)  You're a few days behind in the discussion.

We've decided to keep 3 machines in France to use as squids, and free
hosting has been arranged.

We are accepting one server which looks to be quite useful in our
existing cluster, and it will be shipped to Florida.  We are currently
seeking the most economical way to do that.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Server donation


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski schrieb:

> It would greatly speed up things for European users.

Can you provide any data indicating that the 20ms-lag between this
Atlantic bath tub does represent any kind of bottleneck for the average
European user?


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 10:26:46 -0400, user_Jamesday
<user_jamesday at myrealbox.com> wrote:

> The 4U 6CPU is best for the US side. That's the main page building site and putting it there
> will help everyone who's logged in or getting a non-cached page. Because peak load times
> are different in different parts of the world, the same amount of resources for the central site
> delivers more benefit than dedicating them to any one place.

Yes, resource sharing is the most efficient scheme overall, but there
are other reasons to consider splitting off the European Wikis onto
their own dedicated hardware:

1) Politics/Psychology - Europeans might be more willing to donate if
they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro
servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means
contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).

2) Design Flexibility - Having a completely separate setup on the
other side of the pond would allow (at least in theory) two completely
different configurations.  This could be useful for testing and
comparing different architectures in the future.

3) Redundancy - What happens if Something Awful (tm) happens in
Florida?  Although we have an army of volunteers making regular
off-site backups of the DB, it would still be nice to have an
already-up-and-running duplicate site in place.

I'm sure there are more reasons.... although it's certainly an open
question whether they outweigh the benefits of resource sharing.
Thoughts?

-Bill Clark


body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>>> Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a
>>>> charm
>>> You want just: /^([??????????a-z]+)(.*)$/sD
>>
>> That won't work with UTF-8.
>
> Brion, you're too quick to reply again. I have to admit that I didn't
> think of UTF-8, but:
>
> (a) it *does* work with UTF-8, albeit accidentally, and

It will catch the correct characters, but also incorrect characters.
False positives are not correct functioning.

> (b) either way it's more correct than the other version. You do *not*
>     want a "|" character inside square(!) brackets.

Quite right about the first version, but unrelated to the correctness of
the second version.

> Given the concerns with UTF-8, ?var, I suggest you use:
>
> /^((?:?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|[a-z])+)(.*)$/sD

As already established in the other language files.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] IP anti-paranoia

references:
<20040720235033.AF7EC1AC02E4@mail.wikimedia.org>	<cdm2rl$h9$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<40FE981B.6010805@epfl.ch> <cdm5qb$let$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:31:43 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> Secondly, I really don't like the idea of reinforcing this paranoia that
> exists about IP addresses. Far too many people already think knowing
> someone's IP address is a ticket to reading their personal files on
> their hard disk. At the same time, they think you can hide your IP, and
> don't know that every server you contact records it.

Perhaps mentioning "Your IP address is being recorded" and providing a
link to a page that explains the points you just made?

There must be _some_ logic to notifying potential bad-guys (or -gals)
that their address is being recorded, since the overwhelming majority
of credit card authorization sites I've ever seen do so.

I also agree wholeheartedly with your point about IP paranoia being a
silly thing in general.  It's not true that IP addresses are always
visible, however -- there are public anonymizers that basically act as
proxy servers for people who really are that paranoid.  Only the IP of
the proxy would show up in server logs (although that leaves open the
question of whether you can really trust those anonymizer services...)

-Bill Clark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: issues

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> "In the particular case of Martha Stewart, Anthony takes matters into
> his own hands, breaking long-standing rules that Anthony knows all about."
>
> I think you have mischaracterised this severely.  There is absolutely *no
> rule* saying that Raul has the right to do whatever he wants on that page.
> He merely has been permitted to do whatever he wanted in the past because he
> wasn't doing anything that people disagreed with.  If this were an article,
> this would be clearcut.  See [[Wikipedia:Ownership of articles]].  But for
> some reason because it is a template suddenly people are claiming that it
> can be owned, and that a single person can do whatever he wants?  Well,
> perhaps now that it is clear that people will be blocked for disagreeing
> with Raul on a template that can be considered a rule, but it certainly
> wasn't a long-standing rule before that.

I certainly mischaracterized one thing - I was thinking of Jim Henson
when I wrote Martha Stewart (!) - Stewart was the object of a parallel
dispute on the talk page.

More seriously, the "long-standing rule" I wrote about was the three
revert rule, which you did break. Thus all the rest of your post about
some "ownership of page" rule is a bit of a red herring.

Pete


subject: [WikiEN-l] Dev request re rollback (was issues)

body:
--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> If we're going to have a rollback button, I have a request: a text box
> for a meaningful summary next to it. It can start filled with the
> present default summary, but make it easy to make a rollback meaningful.

Uh - adding an extra step will make the feature much less useful. I can very
quickly use my middle mouse button to open many tabs for each rollback. If I
had to pause for each one and hit a button, then that would at least triple the
amount of time it takes me to revert vandalism.

If admins are abusing this feature, then they should be told to knock it off
and only use their sysop user rights to fight vandalism. Using those powers as
a tool to use against your opponents in an edit war is not acceptable and was
my main point with former-admin 168...

-- mav

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body:
Bill Clark wrote:
>  Maybe the French systems administrators and network engineers would
> have a different way of approaching a problem that wouldn't ever be
> tried if all of the servers remained in Florida.

I find it difficult to imagine why this would be the case.

At least among the developers, I don't know of *any* "nationalistic
chauvanism" that would prevent the acceptance and testing of any ideas
based on geography.  Indeed, I think the majority of developers are
European, anyway.

--Jimbo


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: suggestion from [Wikide-l]

body:
Tobias Hesse wrote:

> We therefore would like to introduce a small JavaScript-script into the
> German wikipedia pages that shows a small text about the wiki principle to
> everybody reaching with an external referrer.

I *think* you can already do that by putting your script into
[[MediaWiki:Monobook.js]].

Not sure though. Try it :)

Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: List of things that need to be done developer-wise
 on the Icelandic Wikipedia

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

> Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a charm

I'm not sure, but this looks like it would also expand on the | character.

You want just: /^([??????????a-z]+)(.*)$/sD

Timwi


body:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:

> Anthony is doing this just because he can

Sounded to me more like he's doing it because he's against fair use images.


body:
Timwi wrote:

> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a charm
>
> I'm not sure, but this looks like it would also expand on the | character.
> You want just: /^([??????????a-z]+)(.*)$/sD

I actually am sure now. I tried it on the German Wikipedia, and indeed
the | character becomes part of the link this way.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Diskussion:Linktrail

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Requests related to sound files

body:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> (2) Someone was nice enough to recommend an open source (GPL) program that
> does midi->ogg conversion much more easily.

What for? MIDI files are nice and compact; OGG would be a lossy
conversion that vastly increases storage requirements and download time
and makes it more difficult to modify the files.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Profiling functions and define

body:
I vaguely remember that the profiling functions
(wfProfileIn/wfProfileOut) use up a lot of processor time, even when empty.

I just saw the PHP "define" function, which seems to work similar to the
C++ preprocessor #define statement.

Would it be possible to "define" the profiling function names once, and
define them as empty (or something) for running code? That would
eliminate the need for the function call.

I'm not sure that this is possible in PHP, however.

Magnus


from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] HP Hardware donation

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Before things are shipped across the ocean, has there been any
>consideration of the effects arising from having machines designed to
>work off the European power grid put into the North American power
>grid.  The supply voltage issue can probably be overcome with
>transformers, but a differnce in the cycling of alternating current
>rates (60 cycles per second in North America) could make them useless.
>Will they even work with the same monitors as are otherwise used in
>North America?

(patting my UK model Alpha) The conversion isn't likely to be difficult
at all... plug in a US model cable, and flip the little red switch on
the power supply from 220V to 120V.  *BAM* UK->US conversion complete.
And this is assuming the power supply isn't autosensing.

(Even my desktop PCs have a switchable power supply.)

--Ricky


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French hardware donation - technical choices made

body:
> I think there is a misunderstanding because the European proxies
> will mirror the WHOLE of the Wikimedia projects: all projects in all
> languages, not only some European languages. And because many
> European people also read and contribute to English projects, even
> if English is not their mother tongue.

That sounds excellent, but isn't that technically difficult?  Maybe
I've missed some discussion of how to do this.

It's easy to fix it so that fr, es, de, are all routed through the
European squid proxies: we just point the dns entries at the new ip
numbers for the French squid cluster, no problem.

It's much harder (right?) to identify where a user is coming from and
route them through the proxy that's best for them.  This is what
Akamai and people like this charge big bucks for doing.

Or, is there a free (or cheap) way to approximate that?

--Jimbo


body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> (Sorry, I correct and/or contradict myself all the time,

Don't apologize for that.  You're kind and thoughtful, and you raise
reasonable questions.  That's worth a lot.

--Jimbo


body:
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> (1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and
> error that uploads are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs,
> this is way, way too small. A 3-4 minutes song in ogg format at
> average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my encoder to its
> lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.  Angela
> has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource,
> not on Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.

I'd like to add to this comment.  I have what is increasingly a fairly
ordinary 5 megapixel digital camera.  I took a ton of photos in Europe
of famous things.  The size of the photos varies to a degree, but most
are 1.8-2.2 Megabytes.  About half of them, therefore, can't be
uploaded unless I reduce the quality.

There are some reasons to limit upload size, particularly if bandwidth
skyrockets, etc.  But 2 Mb is now too small, and I would support a
discussion of moving it to a higher number.  I would say that for the
bulk of photos that people would upload, 3 Mb is more than enough.

For songs, it sounds like 5Mb would be adequate, if barely.

> I want the sound FAQ to refer to it, but I pity the poor person who
> has to go through what I did to get it working. The easiest solution
> would be simply to zip up the working version I have here and let
> Wikipedia host it.

If it is free software, and not encumbered by patents (why are all the
English sites 404) then we can host it.  If there are patent issues
applicable to the U.S. only, then I'm sure some wikipedian will
volunteer a stable place.

--Jimbo


from_name: Christian List

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why are special pages not working on danish Wikipedia?

body:
It looks like the special pages are working on all the other Wikipedias, but
not the danish.
Is there any special reason for that?

One example is the shortpages page.
The danish version does not work:
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciel:Shortpages

But these works fine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Shortpages
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Shortpages
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spesial:Shortpages

Regards
Christian List


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 20:01:49 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I do not get well this argument. Florida is not the english wiki. It is
> OUR wiki. Improving our hardware situation is helping all of us. When
> the servers are down, we are all down. When they are up and happy, we
> are all happy. What is your argument to say it *help* english wikis more
> than others ? Explain please

The English Wikis use a greater portion of the available resources.
That means the new servers would see a similar proportion of their
resources used for serving up English pages.

Or, put another way, an across-the-board 10% increase in the number of
pages served translates into a far larger number for the English Wikis
than anyone else.

I don't really agree that it's a very good argument (after all,
everybody would still see the same percentage performance increase)
but it does mean that the English Wikipedia will see more absolute
benefit from the new servers than anyone else.

-Bill Clark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
I have saved this entire thread and intend to go through it post by
post, with pen and paper beside me, taking extensive notes, in an
effort to generate something like a consensus from what different
people have said.  In addition, for points that seem controversial or
unsettled, I will try to generate a middle-of-the-road proposal of my
own (in search of consensus), and then I'll post the whole thing here
and on meta for feedback.

After that, I'll go through *that* discussion post by post and
generate a final draft proposal, and then I propose that we hold an
en-wide vote.  (en-wide, but I think anyone should be able to vote,
it's just that the process decisions that we make in this case will
not necessarily be binding on future drives to 1.0 in other languages,
nor on future drives to 2.0 in en or whatever.)

I feel that it's necessary here for me to provide some leadership and
say "THIS is the exact proposal."  Unless I do that and submit it to a
ratification vote so that we can get general legitimacy and acceptance
that this is what we should do, we will continue to not-quite move
forward.

--Jimbo


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [WikiEN-l] more questions

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:22:04 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> But, it was a convenience and a custom, and since there would of
> course be universal consensus to move forward with a different scheme,
> there was absolutely no reason to have an episode of civil
> disobedience to change it.  There was no emergency.
Oh, but don't you see? There was! It was a Fair Use picture or
something like that and is therefore was inherently an evil heretical
tool of the Devil. All of Wikipedia was in most grave peril due to its
existance there. We're lucky that the FBI wasn't bursting into the
colo even as it was uploaded.

Or something to that effect, I think. Supposedly.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: HP Hardware donation

body:
So- could you clarify whether Customs is or isn't going to take a
large fee for letting these into the country?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A WikiJamSession Fantasy

body:
In Berlin, I was chatting with Tim Pritlove about the annual
Choas Communication Congress which is held in Berlin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress

This event attracts 2,500 and 3,500 participants (according to
Wikipedia) and a central feature is the "hack center" which gives
access to around 600 people for whatever.

Not described in the Wikipedia article, but attested to by Tim
Pritlove, it's a rocking good time.

So, I had this idea for something we could do as a part of a drive
towards 1.0.  We could get permission from a library or libraries in
some densely populated centers around the world to gain admission
during a holiday or weekend that they would normally be closed.  We'd
set up a wireless broadband network and bring together as many people
as possible to work together day and night in a fun atmosphere to fact
check articles and process them for final publication in a CD-ROM,
with an eye towards print as well of course.

Since we'd be talking about en for this first round, logical cities
for this would be New York and London, with L.A. and Chicago and
Sydney also possible, if there are enough people interested to make
that happen.

We'd strive to have as many people as possible in one location, and to
attract maximum media attention to what we're doing.  So the selection
of a location would involve deliberations about keeping the cost low,
both travel costs and hotel costs for participants travelling some
distance.

For example, although this is too soon, the New York Public Library
will be closed September 4 through September 6, for "Labor Day
Weekend".  There are many other holidays like that one which would
provide a similar opportunity.

Imagine (go with me on this fantasy here) 1000 people working around
the clock with timeouts just to sleep and eat, for 3 full days, to
fact check, copyedit, and approve as many articles as possible.

--Jimbo


body:
Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> I think the best will be to use these squids for the wikis in
> language mostly spoken in Europe and maybe Near-Middle-East and
> Africa.  And NOT use anymore the squids in Florida for these
> language.

I agree with Luc on this, but I freely admit that to me this is the
only option realistically possible anyway, unless we have some way
that I have not learned about to figure out where people are just by
their ip number.

--Jimbo


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:34:41 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> a.  "contributions... going straight to the Euro servers, rather than
> contributing to 'all' wikis" -- this is a mindset that I want to
> strongly discourage, the mindset of nationalism or regionalism.  We
> are a global project, and I don't want people to start thinking of
> "our" wikipedia versus "their" wikipedia.

I'd just assumed that mindset was already there, and thought that it
might impact the willingness of some to donate time and/or resources.
However, I see your point about wanting to discourage that attitude,
and so I guess that should trump other concerns.

> b. "which really means contributing to the English Wikis more than
> anything else" -- if someone contributes to fr wikipedia, it is just
> not true that because the servers are in America, this amounts to
> contributing to en more than anything else.

Sure it's true: Those new servers (except the Euro squid boxes) are
going to spend more cycles serving up English pages than any other
kind, just like all the other servers.

Granted, if they weren't serving up English pages then many of those
cycles would be wasted anyway -- but some people would probably rather
see some cycles wasted if it meant slightly better performance for the
pages in their own language.

That's the same attitude you've already said you want to strongly
discourage, though.

> But geographical remoteness is *less* flexible in this regard.  For
> any N servers, we are more flexible with them in one location rather
> than 2, because servers could be pulled or added to a test cluster
> with a different architecture as we see fit.

I guess I was arguing more for using different clusters for different
Wikis, and you're right that this doesn't really have anything
directly to do with geography.

Truth be told, I've always been an opponent of centralization in any
form.  I just don't trust the idea of having all of the machines in
the same location, watched over by the same engineers, configured the
same way, etc.  Although it might be easier to reconfigure clusters if
they're in the same location, it means that the same people with the
same biases would be doing so.

So I guess my point was that geographic diversity would also imply
procedural and cultural diversity in the operation and configuration
of the equipment, and THAT could provide for more flexibility in
testing different ways of doing things.  Maybe the French systems
administrators and network engineers would have a different way of
approaching a problem that wouldn't ever be tried if all of the
servers remained in Florida.

> First, in terms of having redundancy, it makese sense to first look at
> the most likely points of failure.  Since we are colocation in an
> excellent professional facility with tons of redundancy, the chances
> of the colo itself going down are very low.  I lie awake at nights
> worrying about zwinger, not about the facility itself.

I just worry about the eggs-in-one-basket scenarios:  Airplanes
crashes, hurricanes and earthquakes (yes I know it's Florida :) and
things of that nature.  Like I said, I'm fundamentally opposed to
centralization (and probably more than a bit paranoid).

If nobody else really sees much benefit to having an independent
datacenter setup, then I guess I'll stop trying to think up reasons to
justify it. :)

-Bill Clark


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
user_Jamesday wrote:

>The French donation is a 4U 6CPU Pentium III-750 system with 2GB of RAM and three or four 9GB SCSI drives in a RAID setup; and three 1U Celerons. 2GB for the 4U because it comes with one but the donor is upgrading it to two for us. The other equipment mentioned was for us to consider and the donor would then allocate it among all of the projects which were competing for it. We didn't get it all.
>
>On the technical side, it was decided that the Celerons just aren't suitable for the US site because the US Squids require roughly comparable specifications and the Celerons aren't really fast enough to be page builders, given the shipping costs to get them to the US. So, European Squid caches is the role they best fit. They will need a fairly cheap RAM upgrade to be Squids. These squids will speed things up for those in France and possibly more of Europe who are not logged in, by avoiding the sometimes slow or broken transatlantic links, and for everyone by taking some of the load from the US-based Squids.
>
>
That's excellent! Is there currently a colo in Europe, or someone
willing to host one? If there isn't one, perhaps we should consider
where is
a) cheapest to buy colocation   (or find a donor?)
b) cheapest to buy bandwidth   (or find a donor?)
c) best-connected to the rest of Europe?

At the moment, I would imagine the best candidates to be London or
Amsterdam.

-- Neil


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Summary style is better (was: Action plan for 1.0 -
	news style intros should be recommended more strongly)

body:
Daniel Mayer (maveric149 at yahoo.com) [040721 05:59]:

> That is exactly why I support Summary Style instead of News Style. The
> "dropability" part does not apply to what we are doing and strictly speaking
> News Style only provides for lead sentences, not lead sections.
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style

You are of course correct. (Which is why both Wikipedia:News style and
Wikipedia:summary syle now both say: "For the planned paper Wikipedia 1.0,
one consensus recommendation is that the paper version of articles will be
the lead section of the web version. A concise intro satisfying both
summary style and news style that would work stand-alone is ideal." Reword
as you wish.)

I suppose I'm really pushing for good standalone intros, and news or
summary style is a way to get there.

- d.


from_name: Jim Cecropia

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Chillove, pedophilia, NPOV, and Wikipedia

body:
The entire point of the pictures is that they mildly (you should see the OKmagazine covers I DIDN'T use) illustrate what the movement is really about, which is what makes them so important. I'm sorry that some are offended but remember that the offense stems from what they represent, which is the same as what the article represents.

I honestly and truly don't understand (especially in the intensity of the reactions) how anyone could believe that the posting of those images is propoganda in FAVOR of pedophiles.

--C

> Yes, however morally repugnant we and most of the
> world might find this, stating that there are some
> people who hold this POV and linking to material that
> they produce is NPOV. It is not acceptable to pretend
> that such people do not exist. We must, of course, put
> this in the context of the general feeling in society
> that this is reprehensible.
> Mark
>
>
> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> >
> > > This morning, I removed two images from
> > [[Childlove]]
> >
> > Thanks for announcing it, so someone can revert it
> > ;-)
> >
> > > Frankly, I am quite disgusted by this abuse of our
> > NPOV policy.
> >
> > So now wanting to represent a POV is abuse of the
> > NPOV policy? That's
> > interesting.
> >
> > I haven't participated in this discussion so far
> > because this is a very
> > sensitive subject, and because I didn't know much
> > about it until
> > recently. This discussion got me interested, and I
> > read some of the
> > stuff that was linked to in order to inform myself
> > of the pedophiles'
> > point of view. It is a very radical point of view,
> > and one that is quite
> > contrary to that of society at large, but that only
> > makes it all the
> > more important for us to include it. Someone
> > mentioned early in this
> > discussion that it would be dangerous for us to make
> > the impression that
> > we are somehow endorsing pedophilia, but at the same
> > time, censoring
> > this POV would be endorsing society's aversion,
> > which (apparently)
> > pedophiles perceive as discrimination and prejudice.
> >
> > I therefore strongly suggest we keep images that
> > document this POV (as
> > long as they don't break any laws, of course).
> >
> > Timwi
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
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> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: moink

body:
> > If admins are abusing this feature, then they should be told to knock it off
> > and only use their sysop user rights to fight vandalism. Using those powers as
> > a tool to use against your opponents in an edit war is not acceptable and was
> > my main point with former-admin 168...

Just to clarify then, are admins only supposed to use the rollback
link in cases of simple vandalism?  I wasn't aware that this was
policy, and I've used it a couple of times to revert things that were
a little more complex than run-of-the-mill vandalism.  Of course, I've
never gotten into a revert war (how *do* people manage that?) but I'd
still like to make sure I'm following the rules.

moink


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
Exactly what i was thinking, i often drop in to en. and put some links
to is: it would be great trouble to find out each time whats the most
popular topic at each time.

I think a software solution would be ideal, perhaps a setting?

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:07:14 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
<leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 20. Juli 2004 21:58 schrieb Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales:
> > I just added my vote for "By order of usage pattern in local
> > language", i.e. I think they should be ordered by how people in each
> > wikipedia language community actually use them.  This may require some
> > study of logfiles to see what people are clicking on.
>
> Sorry if I'm totally missing the point, but users are not supposed to know
> this order when adding interwiki links manually, right? Will the software
> take care of that in some future version?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:28:11 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Bill Clark wrote:
> >  Maybe the French systems administrators and network engineers would
> > have a different way of approaching a problem that wouldn't ever be
> > tried if all of the servers remained in Florida.

> I find it difficult to imagine why this would be the case.

Different local policies.  I've had servers in many different
datacenters at different times, and no two places seem to do things
the same way.  The same goes for engineering teams.

This is part of the reason a lot of large companies set up R&D shops
that are geographically and culturally distinct from their main
engineering teams.  You don't want everyone thinking the same, because
it invariably leads to stagnation.  If everyone responsible for
physical management of the clusters is in the same place, they're
likely to end up thinking the same way (which is a good thing too, at
least in terms of everyone getting along).

I'm probably wrong in this instance, though.  There are enough people
who can simply download the software and build their own custom
clusters if they wanted, so this situation isn't really comparable to
an in-house R&D team.  In a sense, we ALREADY have many, many
independent R&D shops, each with their own hardware.

(Sorry, I correct and/or contradict myself all the time, because I
like brainstorming ideas more than I do editing them... which ties in
with my whole anti-centralization philosophy -- I don't want to
unilaterally censor any ideas that pop into my head, but would rather
voice them even if I have my doubts about their viability.)

I'll cheerfully withdraw my suggestion that there's any significant
benefit to keeping the servers separate, in this case. :)

-Bill Clark


from_name: Mark Pellegrini

body:
Let me preface this by saying that I was going to ask Tim in private,
but Angela told me that this would be a better place. In the next couple days,
I'm going to be rewriting the English wikipedia's sound FAQ, and there's a couple things
I want to grouse about.

First, for those of you who have never heard of it, the Mutopia project is to
songs what Project Gutenberg is to text. The offer lots of public
domain midis that are great additions to the project. In the past, I've converted
them the hard way (tying the sound card of one computer to the sound card of
another). I'd record it into wav, encode it as ogg, and then upload it.

Here's where my requests come in:

(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads
are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A
3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my
encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.

Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on
Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.

(2) Someone was nice enough to recommend an open source (GPL) program that
does midi->ogg conversion much more easily. However, it is a *NIGHTMARE* to get
installed. All of the english hosts are 404 (I had to use the internet archive)
- I hope you speak Nihongo. To get it working under windows you have to
download the patches - 19(!) rar files worth.

I want the sound FAQ to refer to it, but I pity the poor person who has to go through
what I did to get it working. The easiest solution would be simply to zip up the working
version I have here and let Wikipedia host it.

I'd like these issues address in the near future so I can start rewriting the FAQ.

--Mark
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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anthony and the Main Page edit war

body:
> > > Anthony is doing this just because he can
> > Sounded to me more like he's doing it because he's against fair use
images.
> Seems like both, really.

First of all, I'm not against fair use images.  I'm against non-free images
being featured on the front page, especially ones with no source information
or which are especially unlikely to be reusable by a large majority of
people.

Secondly, I can't, apparently.  I thought I could, I guess.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: some questions

body:
> > Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored,
> > such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.

> For the record, during that edit war, I reverted exactly 4 times.
> Orginally, only 3, but [[User:Danny]] told me to revert a 4th time and
> he would protect the page.  Ask him... I was rather hesistant to break
> the 3 revert rule.

So not only did you break the 3-revert guideline without any repercussions,
you were actually *encouraged* to do so by another admin.  In my opinion
that only raises more questions.

> It's meant for vandalism of any kind, anonymous or no. And yes, I agree
> that according to our policies, this situation should not be handled
> with the rollback button, which is why I brought up the point in the
> first place.

I was basing my statement on [[Wikipedia:Administrators]] which says that
the revert button "expedites the reversion of edits by anonymous vandals."
I'm not sure where there's an actual guideline as to how it should be used,
though.


subject: [Wikitech-l] IP anti-paranoia

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:

[ warning anonymous users that their IP will be visible ]
> I think this is a very good idea, as it may discourage potential vandals.

I strongly oppose.

Firstly, there is no reason to believe that it would discourage vandals
more than legitimate contributors. In all likelihood, it would
discourage a casual legitimate contributor more; a determined vandal
will just create an account or not care.

Secondly, I really don't like the idea of reinforcing this paranoia that
exists about IP addresses. Far too many people already think knowing
someone's IP address is a ticket to reading their personal files on
their hard disk. At the same time, they think you can hide your IP, and
don't know that every server you contact records it.

Timwi


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:11:37 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> It's much harder (right?) to identify where a user is coming from and
> route them through the proxy that's best for them.  This is what
> Akamai and people like this charge big bucks for doing.

> Or, is there a free (or cheap) way to approximate that?

I believe BIND is supposed to have support for topology-based answers
to queries, but I'm not sure how well it works (I switched over to
djbdns some time ago... and djbdns definitely doesn't support such
fancy features).

Normally it would be a pain to (efficiently) determine location based
on IP, but since the distinction between ARIN and RIPE addresses
should be easier to determine, it might be possible to set up such
mappings.

I'll look into this some and report back on it.

-Bill Clark


from_name: sean.clarke at guardian.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] a proposal: wikigenealogy

body:
hello

I've long wished there were a genealogical database of European monarchs
etc, where for instance Charlemagne exists as an entry with his wives
listed in one column, his sons in another, his daughters in another, his
known mistresses in another and his mother and father in two more.

as it grew (wikistyle) you could then see things like: all male descendants
of Charlemagne (or whoever) or choose to display the information in all
sorts of ways.

but I don't know a) how to do it or b) if wikipedia is the right place for
it

any thoughts?

sc

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from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] also a suggestion but from /.

body:
  Whatismore, many visitors reach us from
> google (we have got a very good rank for many key words) and then have no
> idea what the Wikipedia is about.

and when the edit anonymous the do not know that there ipadress is
recorded in public. I do not care about that but some do.

So a option to display a notice when you edit a article in anonymous
modus so you can include a warning about that.

--
[[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] French hardware donation - technical choices made

body:
Hi,

Le Wednesday 21 July 2004 17:03, Neil Harris a ?crit :
>
> That's excellent! Is there currently a colo in Europe, or someone
> willing to host one? If there isn't one, perhaps we should consider
> where is
> a) cheapest to buy colocation   (or find a donor?)
> b) cheapest to buy bandwidth   (or find a donor?)
> c) best-connected to the rest of Europe?
>
> At the moment, I would imagine the best candidates to be London or
> Amsterdam.
>
> -- Neil

We already found a sponsor willing to host the 3 Celeron for free in France.

Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: blankfaze

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: some questions

body:
Anthony DiPierro writes:
> So not only did you break the 3-revert guideline without any repercussions,
> you were actually *encouraged* to do so by another admin.  In my opinion
> that only raises more questions.

Anthony, you are acting incredibly childishly.  If you hadn't reverted
Danny seconds after he reverted (before he could protect) then he
wouldn't have *had* to ask me.  There are exceptions to all rules,
Anthony, and I think when a user is acting like a *5-year-old* with a
main page template, a small incursion becomes necessary.  It was
either (a) continue to engage in an endless revert war visible to
anyone visiting the site, or (b) put an end to it.

I chose the latter.


body:
 Jimbo wrote: "If it is free software, and not encumbered by patents (why
are all the
English sites 404) then we can host it.  If there are patent issues
applicable to the U.S. only, then I'm sure some wikipedian will
volunteer a stable place."

The program I was talking about, Timidity++
(http://timidity.sourceforge.net/), is GPL,
and it converts midi into other formats.

We all know ogg is not patent encumbered. As for midi, I went to our article
on Midi:
The SMF specification was developed by, and is maintained by, the MIDI
Manufacturer's Association (MMA)

So I went to their website and found: The MMA maintains strategic
relationships with
other organizations to assist and promote the use of MIDI technology in new
areas.
These relationships have lead to the inclusion of MIDI in MPEG-4, IEEE-1394
(FireWire),
and 3GPP (3rd Generation Mobile Phones) standards.
--http://www.midi.org/about-mma/abtmma.shtml

If it's part of an IEEE standard, I *highly* doubt it is encumbered by
patents - I'm almost
certain that you have to surrender IP claims to be included in one.

The only thing I added were the patches necessary to make it work on windows
(the rar files from
http://web.archive.org/web/20030618040819/www.stardate.bc.ca/eawpatches/html/get_patches.htm)
All of this leads me to believe that hosting this program won't be a
problem.

--Mark


body:
"What for? MIDI files are nice and compact; OGG would be a lossy
conversion that vastly increases storage requirements and download time
and makes it more difficult to modify the files."

True, but I wasn't sure if Midi was one of the formats that we approve of -
I was under the impression that it wasn't. Of course, we should remember
that
midi sounds different from player to player - what instrument gets mapped to
each channel depends on your midi sythesizer. Furthermore, I know of no
portable
player that supports midi, and converting out of midi format is *HARD* - the
software to do it is difficult to come by.

--Mark


from_name: Bill Clark

body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:49:53 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I agree with Luc on this, but I freely admit that to me this is the
> only option realistically possible anyway, unless we have some way
> that I have not learned about to figure out where people are just by
> their ip number.

>From http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/node/view/239 :

68.32.0.0 - 68.63.255.255 = US
68.20.0.0 - 68.23.255.255 = US
4.0.0.0 - 4.255.255.255 = US
68.64.0.0 - 68.71.255.255 = US
210.10.0.0 - 210.10.127.255 = AU
12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255 = US
195.224.0.0 - 195.224.255.255 = UK
211.10.20.0 - 211.10.20.255 = JP
211.13.128.0 - 211.13.159.255 = JP
35.0.0.0 - 35.255.255.255 = US
64.0.0.0 - 64.3.255.255 = US
65.0.0.0 - 65.6.255.255 = US
67.43.144.0 - 67.43.159.255 = US
67.43.160.0 - 67.43.175.255 = US
68.96.0.0 - 68.111.255.255 = US
69.0.128.0 - 69.0.255.255 = US
69.132.0.0 - 69.135.255.255 = US
69.30.192.0 - 69.30.223.255 = US
83.226.0.0 - 83.227.255.255 = SE
84.128.0.0 - 84.135.255.255 = DE
84.64.0.0 - 84.71.255.255 = GB

It's fairly straight-forward to get more information like this.  The
ARIN/RIPE (and APNIC for Asia) breakdown is fairly clean.  Things only
get messy once you're inside a particular range (trying to figure out
how the ARIN blocks break down, or even how ATT distributes its blocs
geographically, is a total nightmare -- but not impossible.. that's
basically what Akamai does for all that money).

It looks like the "sortlist" option in BIND might do what's
required... but a (perhaps) better way occurred to me as well -- do
source-based NAT before requests reach the nameservers.

It's simple to set up two completely different nameservers that return
different RRsets (I do this all the time so that machines on my
internal networks use internal IPs for machines, and outsiders get the
outside addresses).  We could simply do the same thing by configuring
a router to forward requests from a RIPE bloc to one nameserver (which
returns the European address) and to forward requests from everywhere
else to the other nameserver (which would return the Florida
addresses).

I think the routing-based magic would be preferable to a solution in
BIND because I trust routers more than I trust BIND.

-Bill Clark


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:07:05 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's fairly straight-forward to get more information like this.  The
> ARIN/RIPE (and APNIC for Asia) breakdown is fairly clean.

Here's the full breakdown:

http://spamid.servebeer.com:8081/utils/include/spamid/registry_mappings.jsp

-Bill Clark


from_name: Stephan Walter

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> and when the edit anonymous the do not know that there ipadress is
> recorded in public. I do not care about that but some do.
>
> So a option to display a notice when you edit a article in anonymous
> modus so you can include a warning about that.

I think this is a very good idea, as it may discourage potential vandals.

Something like this:
"Note: Your IP address will be recorded if you edit this article. If you
do not want that, please consider [[creating an account]] using a nickname."

Regards,
Stephan

--
Stephan.Walter at epfl.ch  --  http://lart.info/~stw/  --  PGP: B2421799


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:13:05 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's the full breakdown:
>
> http://spamid.servebeer.com:8081/utils/include/spamid/registry_mappings.jsp

...and here's how to implement the proposed geographic load balancing in BIND:

http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/news/views_0501.html

-Bill Clark


body:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:45:18 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...and here's how to implement the proposed geographic load balancing in BIND:
>
> http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/news/views_0501.html

(Oh, and for the record, djbdns CAN do this as well, I'd just never
used that feature before.)

-Bill Clark


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: HP Hardware donation

body:
Anthere wrote:
> An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.

I've been asked by that employee if we could possibly keep this quiet
for now, as there are some internal issues to be worked out first.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: also a suggestion but from /.

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:

> Something like this:
> "Note: Your IP address will be recorded if you edit this article. If you
> do not want that, please consider [[creating an account]] using a
> nickname."
>
> Regards,
> Stephan

The exact frase is up to every wiki to dicide. But I am not in favour to
point to mush to creating a account for new visitors. When the make
edits anonymous it is much more easy to notice them and supervise there
edits. (at least on NL) If the are serious the will find it soon enough
about creating an account.
--
[[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: HP Hardware donation

body:
Philippe Elie wrote:

> There was some confusion about the given HW:
>
>  3 * 1U (celeron 600, 20G IDE, 128 RAM)
>  1 * 4U (6xPIII 750, 2G Ram, 4*9G SCSI Raid)
>
> Others box has been given to other projects.
>
> phe

We are getting more wiki everyday :-)
We even have historical versions for gifts just as for articles :-)


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: HP Hardware donation


body:
Neil Harris wrote

> At the moment, I would imagine the best candidates to be London or
> Amsterdam.
>
> -- Neil

Basing yourself on ... ?


body:
Bill Clark wrote:
  Europeans might be more willing to donate if
> they knew that their contributions were going straight to the Euro
> servers, rather than contributing to "all" Wikis (which really means
> contributing to the English Wikis more than anything else).

> Thoughts?
>
> -Bill Clark

I do not get well this argument. Florida is not the english wiki. It is
OUR wiki. Improving our hardware situation is helping all of us. When
the servers are down, we are all down. When they are up and happy, we
are all happy. What is your argument to say it *help* english wikis more
than others ? Explain please


from_name: Timwi

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>>
>>> Changed it to /^([?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|a-z]+)(.*)$/sD , works like a
>>> charm
>>
>> I'm not sure, but this looks like it would also expand on the |
>> character.
>>
>> You want just: /^([??????????a-z]+)(.*)$/sD
>
> That won't work with UTF-8.

Brion, you're too quick to reply again. I have to admit that I didn't
think of UTF-8, but:

(a) it *does* work with UTF-8, albeit accidentally, and
(b) either way it's more correct than the other version. You do *not*
     want a "|" character inside square(!) brackets.

Given the concerns with UTF-8, ?var, I suggest you use:

/^((?:?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|?|[a-z])+)(.*)$/sD

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Ronny Raschkowan

subject: [Wikitech-l] All Wikis can block logged in users now.

body:
Hello!

I just have added a line to the CommonSettings.php (and deleted the
individual lines at InitialseSettings.php) allowing each wiki to
block logged in users.

Please note that whilst this feature is technically available, this
doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to use it, because there
might be policies on your wiki restricting this.

You can block a logged in user like you would block an IP, typing in an
username instead of an IP.

Sincerly yours,
Fire


subject: [Foundation-l] All Wikis can block logged in users now.