Wikipedia Needs $20K

TaranRampersad writes "Wikipedia's server is crashing off and on, and Jimmy Wales has posted a letter requesting some assistance from anyone out there with a dollar burning a hole in their pocket. Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway ..."

Comments

Letter Content

[filledwithloathing]

Hopefully so that they have less bandwidth bills to pay and therefore need less money.

Letter to our readers and contributors By Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation, Director December 28, 2003

As you have all seen the past few days, we have been having technical difficulties. The essential problem is that we do not currently have enough hardware to cope with routine failures of any kind. When any one of our machines goes down, we experience cascading problems due in part to the excess load on the entire system.

The solution to this problem is to purchase now sufficient hardware to give us enough excess capacity so that we can be reliable. I estimate that $20,000 in hardware would get us to a point where we have reserves to handle the failure of any one machine. Additionally, we would be well-poised to continue our track record of astounding growth.

We currently have total funds of about $4,200. Additionally, I am donating (via Bomis) 1 new webserver. I am putting together, in consultation with our technical team, an order for new hardware totalling $20,000. For details of what we are purchasing, or if you have expertise and would like to help guide us, join the wikitech-l mailing list. [Note that when Wikipedia is down, the mailing list subscription is affected, too.]

I will post daily or twice-daily updates on this web page as well as keeping the mailing lists informed at the same time.

Your help is much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jimbo Wales

As it probably won't survive the slashdotting

[jonbryce]

Donations should be sent to

Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
3911 Harrisburg St. NE
St. Petersburg, FL 33703

Can't see any way to post the paypal links here.

Re:details

[brion]

We've presently got three servers:

• Web server 1: Pentium III 866MHz
• Web server 2/backup DB/mail: dual Athlon MP 2600
• Database server: dual Opteron 2GHz

Web server 2 and the database server are presently offline, respectively for disk and RAM problems. A second fast web server is being installed tomorrow, at which point we'll hopefully get the other one back online too.

Networking and bandwidth isn't a problem at all, and we're actually in a reasonable place CPU-wise when everything's up (though more is always better). What we need is more robustness in the case of server failures; we need enough machines available that one machine going down doesn't kill us, and that we can still limp along with two down.

It's not like Wikipedia will vanish tomorrow if we don't have $20k, but failover and growth capacity will be good to have.

Worth saving

[chazzf]

Having edited a number of entries on Wikipedia myself, I have to say that this is a project worth saving. The sheer volume of information is remarkable, and often more useful than that in an encyclopedia. Moreover, the open nature of project leads, in my opinion, to more balanced articles. Article have to stand up to the scrutiny of thousands of different people, from many different countries around the world. All things considered, 20K isn't a whole hell of a lot to keep it going. I gave $10 myself, it would take just 2000 people doing so to get things back together. Hardly unreasonable...